With Reviews of books by Rebecca Salazar, Jake Byrne, and Margo LaPierre.
antibody by Rebecca Salazar (McClelland & Stewart, 2025)
To say I was eager for Rebecca Salazar’s follow up to their debut would be an understatement. I remember reading sulphurtongue and feeling like I was holding hot coals in my hands. I couldn’t sit still with the book. I paced with anticipation as I turned page after page. If sulphurtongue was hot coals, then antibody was a fireball greased between my palms. antibody blazes unfiltered as it navigates the messy horrors of sexual assault, abuse, pregnancy loss, chronic illness, the “femme a ticking time bomb / friendly-fire friendzone / triggered bitch is asking / for it, triggered”.
antibody embraces horror and body horror. It challenges and reframes the narratives surrounding what it looks like to survive trauma. The poems are unflinching in what they confront, utilizing the very things that bloom from trauma as raw material. Horror isn’t just genre in antibody, it’s cellular, part of the body’s composition as survival. Salazar understands this and uses antibody to reclaim it, directing it with rage and power “blood in the teeth and dream / within a dream within a photograph. / that mounted bear head twinned / in yet another dreamer’s selfie dump, / another name to flesh the tally—“ .
Salazar has created a book that dismantles and burns while simultaneously building community, kinship and care.
As a survivor, one thing I noticed while reading is I felt safe from the moment I read the dedication and trigger warning to the first page. I had to move slowly but I felt safe in the rage, the horror, the care in which this book was written. Yes, this collection is objectively intense. However, Salazar has created a book that dismantles and burns while simultaneously building community, kinship and care. There’s no shortage of examples of this throughout antibody but one of the most powerful is a cento titled exquisite corpse. Salazar stitches lines from other poets inspired by their reading during the Sealey challenge.
antibody welcomes survivors and says there’s a place for you here. It creates a safe space, a space for agency and choice for those chronically pushed to the margins “survivors, every-gendered, joining bodies / joining limbs with every body human, / more than human, every body that / was ever used as poetry by rapists”.
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Rebecca Salazar (she/they) is a queer, disabled, and racialized Latinx writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. Their first full-length collection sulphurtongue (McClelland & Stewart) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the New Brunswick Book Awards, the Atlantic Book Awards, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. antibody is their second poetry collection.
DADDY by Jake Byrne (Brick Books, 2024)
Back in fall 2024 I went to Another Story Bookshop to attend the launch of Jake Byrne’s poetry collection DADDY. There was something about Byrne’s second collection that felt magnetic, urgent and closely personal that I needed to see in person. I didn’t know it then but there was a connection being forged between myself and the book. DADDY is explicit as it tells of generational trauma, family dynamics, body image, sex, madness, queerness and “daddy” issues. I saw myself in DADDY. I didn’t want to but Byrne created a world where I saw shards of my life “Bowed down toward the ground / Now in supplication / Waiting for some unlikely angel / To appear to us anon and intervene”.
Reading DADDY was an intimate experience.
Reading DADDY was an intimate experience. I felt like Byrne created a theater just for me and these poems were speaking directly to my life and experiences. Isn’t that what good poetry does? Forges a close, sometimes uncomfortable conversation between poem and reader? I felt similar in the audience at the launch. As Byrne read from DADDY, I noticed this intimacy became communal. Each time their voice speared the air with “DADDY” we felt the colossal, overarching presence of this father figure in Byrne’s poetry.
I admire poets who can take the raw material of primal feeling, trauma, the “brain screaming / can you not see i am unlovable / unfuckable?” and create a coherent book that refuses to pull its punches. DADDY is a mirror into the wild and frantic nature of the mind. It feels like a terrifying reflection for the speaker that softens the more it comes into focus. This isn’t because “DADDY” becomes less of a titanic presence in the speaker’s life, instead, he becomes more human as the speaker begins to see pieces of themself within him. In the poem “Madness”, Byrne’s speaker takes a reflective stance, building a bridge between the section to come while crowning the first section with compassion, fear, confusion and understanding. The speaker says “What I didn’t expect / When I moved through my life / Is that when mania came for me / I would fall into it, willingly”.
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Jake Byrne is the author of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) and DADDY (Brick Books, 2024). In 2019, they won CV2‘s Foster Prize for poetry. They live in Toronto/tka:ronto.
In Violet by Margo LaPierre (Anstruther Press, 2024)
Poets can do so much with the chapbook as a medium, so it’s interesting to see where they go. Will it be a small self-contained terrarium? A bridge towards a larger work? Or a small breath between projects? When I listened to an episode of Howl where Hollay Ghadery interviewed Margo LaPierre about her chapbook In Violet and Ajar (Guernica Editions) this was discussed in detail. In the interview LaPierre read two versions of the introductory poem. The first from In Violet and the second from her forthcoming collection. Immediately, I noticed how much the poem evolved over time and between projects. It was exciting, not just for what was coming from LaPierre but for the poems preserved within the chapbook calling out like “A low and rising cello note”.
In Violet manages to pack a lot within a little.
In Violet is short but full of heart and sting. The sting is almost incorporeal as pain echoes from poem to poem. In Violet manages to pack a lot within a little; violence, gendered violence, trauma, mental health. There’s a fragmented quality to the poetry that invokes uncertainty and fear. In the poem “Characteristics on Nonlinear Systems”, LaPierre implements white space to create a trench between the past, meaning and memory. In “Estuary”, the slash serves as a jarring shift in thought process. Earlier, this fragmented quality is even more prevalent in the poems “Hysteresis” and “Brute”. LaPierre fragments language as if taking words to the guillotine “the past g/ ripping my body.”
The past, memory and questions haunt the speaker. In Violet reaches for the future but shows the reality of what happens when “the past is a mysterious cold spot appearing in the body.” Violence, trauma, mental illness never drift far from the present. Many of the poems in In Violet make that clear, however, “Surf Lessons”, embodies the chapbook best when it says “Fuck the rage that eats us. / This is a healing spell”.
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Margo LaPierre is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, PRISM, and Arc, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection.
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
- Michael Russellhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michael-russell/
- Michael Russellhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michael-russell/
- Michael Russellhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/michael-russell/
