With reviews of books by Jordan Williamson, Victoria Mbabazi, and Manahil Bandukwala & Conyer Clayton
Love’s Little Dojo by Jordan Williamson (Pinhole Poetry, 2025)
Sparking curiosity and wonder, I was intrigued by the title of Jordan Williamson’s chapbook Love’s Little Dojo. In my mind, I drew a map of possibilities and questions, what could this be about? Where could it go? Williamson hooked me with a simple, peculiar title that was vibrant, colourful and evocative. I noticed a similar trend with his language. Williamson has this warm, conversational style that pushes through even when he’s writing heavier topics. His poems feel rural as they graze the small details of the everyday whether that’s “the day’s / well-greased palm” or “an antique tractor / hidden in tall grass”. The poems take the ordinary, dust it off and find something extraordinary with deeper meaning and feeling to give the reader “something to look out toward.”
Love’s Little Dojo is emotionally layered. It opens with “Today the mood is brighter / but still not over everything.” The chapbook explores depression, family history, family, self-image and love. Love’s Little Dojo is about heart just as much as it’s about the fight to be, to show up as you are and hope you’re enough, to “canoodle with the idea of loving / everything you almost were.” This chapbook isn’t afraid to stare the beast in the eyes and say “Everything is terrible / myself especially.”
With that being said, Williamson takes care of the reader. He’s mindful of the pacing throughout the book. There’s a strong emotional build up and peak through the middle that slowly peters out and transitions to love. When I read a poet’s work I pay attention to sequencing. Is the arc they’re trying to convey clear? Does it make sense? Is it a labyrinth I need to solve? Williamson builds a strong emotional arc over Love’s Little Dojo with several smaller arcs woven into it, each smoothly transitioning to the next. When I got to the last poem, “Epilogue” everything wasn’t butterflies and roses, but it was authentic. The speaker was honest and transparent with the reader when he said he’s “… scouring for love / in some dumb field …”
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Jordan Williamson is a father and poet from London, Ontario. His work has been featured in The Temz Review, Tilted House and “Stones Beneath the Surface” a poetry anthology from Black Mallard Poetry.
The Siren in the Twelfth House by Victoria Mbabazi (Palimpsest Press, 2024)
Sometimes the most challenging part of reading a poetry collection is trying to figure out the arc. Where’s this going? What’s the theme? Is the arc emotional? Narrative-centric? Conceptual? As a reader, I like to be perfumed in mystery, not suffocated by it. I don’t come to poetry to be confused or to solve problems, which is one of the reasons why I love Victoria Mbabazi’s debut collection The Siren in the Twelfth House. Their book is relentlessly consistent in both theme and delivery.
The Siren in the Twelfth House is a collection of love poems written in astrology’s blood, storied with heartbreak, heartache, grief, survival and becoming. The poems show us what it means (and what it costs) to be alive, full of feeling and here. As these poems travel the astrological houses, the speaker tells us “I am mid air / thrown up in the wreckage of our home darling I’ve fallen in love / with the tornado that blew it to pieces.” The Siren in the Twelfth House devastates and destroys before it mends and heals. This is a collection of healing and becoming whole through breaking, through loss and grief, through “breathlessness and bruising / I think there is much to learn from water / how it empties how my home survived a dense / emptiness.”
I have to highlight how well-crafted these poems are, how they give without demanding anything but presence from the reader. Astrology, although popular, isn’t common knowledge. This collection is built in a way that allows any reader to enjoy these poems even without a strong working knowledge of astrology. Secondly, it’s incredibly difficult to sculpt highly emotive poems that drown and burn but don’t smother the reader. Mbabazi has a way of adding flesh to feeling, creating realistic poetry that mirrors the emotions it embodies. One of the most potent techniques Mbabazi utilizes is the absence of punctuation. This draws emphasis to the line and line breaks, dragging the reader into a maelstrom that may or may not grant them air “…do not move closer I am not / in the mood for softness choose me / choose me at a distance…”
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Victoria Mbabazi is a Pisces with an Aries Moon. Their first chapbook, chapbook, is available with Anstruther Press and their double chapbook, Flip, is available with Knife | Fork | Book. The Siren in the Twelfth House is their first full-length poetry collection.
Sprawl | the time it took us to forget by Manahil Bandukwala and Conyer Clayton (Collusion Books, 2020)
Something magical happens when you read a book of poems and you’re flooded with memories from your life. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, my partner and I didn’t quarantine together. A lot of life happened separately but somehow, we found a way to make it work. We went for walks at the same time, exchanged photos, coloured over zoom, gamed, had dinner and watched the same movies. We mourned this strange period in our history, yet still we managed the distance, learned to share together apart, together-apart, apart together. Sprawl brought this back and reminded me “Through distance / I wrap my arms around another body.”
Sprawl is the collaborative product of Manahil Bandukwala and Conyer Clayton. Against the blurred backdrop of the COVID-19 lockdowns, these poems are epistolary infused reflections that “measure life / not in seconds / but in pollen.” Bandukwala and Clayton create a conversation between their poems that invoke intimacy, compassion and friendship. The speakers share an honesty with each other that supports the often quiet, sometimes brooding, but always razor-sharp portraits of their lives. They remind each other “we’re in this together / but please / leave me alone.”
At its core, this is a book of friendship.
Sprawl is built on repetition. It recycles images, lines and phrases, personalizing what came before so it never feels repetitive or forced. When reading, I kept getting this image of a sort of knitting of language. Two voices folded into each other, using strands of what already exists to hold and uplift what comes next. Bandukwala and Clayton’s speakers naturally enhance each other’s poems. Together, they weave something new, individual and differently whole. What’s most heartening about Sprawl’s call-and-response is not in its technique or originality. At its core, this is a book of friendship. No matter how one poem ends, the speaker in the next will always answer:
“Can you fish me out / without burning yourself?”
“Without burning yourself, / I reach into a bubbling pot.”
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Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer and editor from Kentucky currently living in Ottawa. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (A Feed Dog Book by Anvil Press, 2022, Winner of The Archibald Lampman Award and Finalist for the Pat Lowther, Raymond Souster, and ReLit Awards) and We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020, Winner of the Ottawa Book Award). They’ve also released the album Further Behind You and many other solo and collaborative chapbooks, musical releases, and sound-based works.
Michael Russell (he/they) is the queer, mad mother monster behind two chapbooks, gallery of heartache (forthcoming from 845 Press) and Grindr Opera (Frog Hollow Press). They are the coauthor of chapbook Split Jawed with Elena Bentley (forthcoming from Collusion Books). As always, he thinks you’re fantabulous. Insta: @michael.russell.poet
