Throwback: Midway by Kayla Czaga | The Miramichi Reader

“Sometimes I am frightened/but I’m ready to learn/of the power of love.”

According to some mythologies, the gods envy humans our mortality. They believe that it is knowledge of death that gives us the capacity to love passionately and deeply. When a beloved parent dies, they take with them not only all the stories we have been told and remember, but also their secrets. Told or untold, their stories continue to shape and inform our lives, define for us some of what it means to love and be loved.

…..My father came to Canada. I write poems. 
The suitcase he carried is my heaviest textbook.   (Baggage)

Kayla Czaga’s Midway is her third book of poems. It is a brilliantly grief-stricken carnival ride into elegy and rant. A talent for narrative arc and a fresh eye for grief’s many daily manifestations takes these poems from the hair of a dead man’s head into imaginary movies, time travel, underworlds, and repeatedly, the implacable grit of daily life. For any reader who has travelled through grief (and who has not?), these poems take us to places we have never been that are both unexpected and familiar, unlikely and utterly convincing.

An encounter with her father in the fish tank of a neighbourhood restaurant is an occasion for a tightly crafted 53 line one stanza meditation on being bereft in the face of death, held in place by one phrase that doesn’t occur until line 45: “his daughter eats alone”:

The saddest creature on earth
bobs in a foggy tank
in that Vietnamese restaurant
on the corner of Main and 33rd.
He—maybe not he, though
I think of the fish that way—
has my father’s face, his exact
features, but the colouring’s
wrong. My father was ruddy,
this fish is translucent and grey.
Otherwise it’s him. I’d know 
those lips and that nose
on any creature…
The pieces of our grief
are as numerous as his new scales
and the noodles in my soup
sending up a curtain of steam.
I sip the complicated broth
of my father’s sadness, beg 
his scales for forgiveness
as they weigh me.           (Pho Fish)

In Dad Movie, the poem weaves (im)possible plot lines into an ordinary weekend at home, as a daughter watches movies with her father “on the brown floral sofa that just about sums up my childhood”—

In the movie, a secret agent and a marine biologist
must pair up to save the world from a sea monster

the villains have organized into a secret weapon.
The villains might be Russians, anarchists, neo-Nazis…

 If this was a Scorcese movie, there’d be no marine biologist,
no women at all, no monster except the one that slithers

inside each man, as my father drives home at dawn
from the smelter with the other busted-up family men.  (Dad Movie)

After death, life goes on – relentlessly and fortunately:

“Recently while reading my dinosaur erotica poem/at a festival, I thought, Is this it? Is this the life/ I wanted when I was a child? To grow up to tell/ the world’s longest dinosaur dick joke/to rooms full of strangers?” (Another Poem About Dinosaurs).

In another poem, “The sand/ that gets in everything/still gets in everything./You’re here. You get it.” (Valentine’s Day 2023).

There is a ten page poem at the heart of Midway. In masterful command of her craft and her art, the poet moves her long poem through lyrics overheard while eating shawarma in South Africa, the well-meaning and useless things people say to the grieving, the cat named Grandpa waiting at home, the banks of the Thames and the wife who has used all her Air Miles to fly to London just to be there to hold her hand. Back in Canada, there is a train trip through Southern Ontario while reading Sally Rooney, a dream while travelling on a Greyhound bus. And more. But none of it will be permitted “to just let it power wash/the grief from my heart.” (The Power of Love)
The poems are evocative in their clarity and their truthfulness: rueful, reflective, funny, angry, despairing, accepting. These poems have surprised me into a deeper understanding of what I thought I already knew and knew well. Midway is a highly accomplished piece of writing and an enduring testament to the story-making powers of love.

Kayla Czaga is the author of two previous poetry collections—For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), and Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019). Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Frequently anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry in English series, her writing also appears in The Walrus, Grain, Event, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, the Songhees and Esquimalt nations.

Publisher: House of Anansi Press (April 2, 2024)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 88 pages
ISBN: 9781487012601

Susan Wismer

Susan is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Manidoo-gitchigami (Georgian Bay) in Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog. Recent publications include a collaborative chapbook,Hand Shadowswith Michele Green and Suzette Sherman (Wintergreen Press, 2024). Hag Dancesis coming out with At Bay Press in Spring 2025.www.susanwismer.com