Suffused with a bitter irony, Richard-Yves Sitoski’s A Current Through the Flesh is a powerful, and powerfully honest, examination of family. A key aspect for Sitoski is captured in the poem “Above All Else”: “a family is what happens to an infant, instantly, / no way to prepare,…” As this suggests, for the author, family came with considerable pain, both psychological and physical. During his interrogation of this experience there are lines that reach out from the page and seize hold of the reader: “it’s a father emotive as a moai and a mother with a wind-up key / between her shoulders…” (“Above All Else”); “I shared in Mom’s suffering, but I spoke like a dog explaining metaphysics, which meant that she only heard me howl.” (“A Guide to Canine Behaviour”)
The first section, “Low-Hanging Fireworks,” is primarily a portrait of growing up with the author’s parents. As depicted in Sitoski’s striking imagery, this was, to say the least, difficult; indeed, sometimes traumatic and violent:
“She arrived with ellipses, he with an interrobang.” ("Low-Hanging Fireworks")“Some nights he played heads like percussion instruments. / Some days her migraines were long-hanging fireworks.” ("Low-Hanging Fireworks")“one day your love / will make it last trip to the vet” ("Things My Mother Learned Too Late")“…when you try to leave / your husband will be everywhere//like the sound of a single cricket” ("Things My Mother Learned Too Late")Next comes the “Canadian Rising” part, which explores other facets of family. It is divided into three units; the first of these, “Sitowski,” delivers into the author’s father’s family, centred on his paternal grandfather. Even here, Sitoski’s father looms large: “But what I have cannot be cured by collagen. / I’ve got that thing where you grow up / with a father who hates everyone / including the people he loves” (“Medicinal”).
“Krupa” brings in the author’s sister, and positions her as another witness to the family trauma. Events come to a head in “A Current Through the Flesh,” the intense titular poem for the entire volume. It is addressed directly to the author’s sister: “Sister, I only wish that Mother were here. / ” … ”Remember? Bending down for a kiss she lost us//in the light of a benevolent season.” Soon the author is running home from church (“erupting from the pew”) where something truly awful has happened: “But it was her face, tattooed from behind / in the ink of her own blood—the vessel’s tracery / a shroud of crimson lace, / her brow a signed self-portrait of our Maker.” In the end, the author “…will lie in bed / and shut my eyes like cellar doors. / I will sink beneath a man / whose hands are shovel blades”.
The final section within “Canadian Rising” is entitled “Gratton,” which brings in the family of Sitoski’s mother, especially his maternal grandfather. The family was from a town, which, among other things was “A place where you rose from bed / knowing that dreams were for the sleeping” (“Plank, Nail and Slowness”). In the end, Sitoski says a poignant farewell to his mother: “Before you got ill, we took walks in the woods / where you pulled on limbs so it looked / like you held hands with trees.” … “…Or maybe you / were saying I could be whole after all, / that what I needed to survive was / all around me…” (“Apron Strings”)
The penultimate part, “I Placed a Jar (Slight Return),” was my favourite. First, a little tangent on one aspect of the title. “Slight Return” of course often refers to a reprise, or a faster, condensed version of something preceding; here it also seems to have another meaning as discussed below. For me, the phrase also harkens back to “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”, the legendary 1968 song by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. “I Placed a Jar (Slight Return)” is an extended piece, alternating between free verse and prose poetry. There are two entwined memory tours here, the recollections often being difficult. The verse pieces trace a journey to scatter the ashes of Sitoski’s father, the jar in the section title referring to the vessel containing them. This mission had an awkward finale, as expressed in the final verse piece: “…part of you / flies on the wind, / part of you sinks in the shallows, / part of you covers my hands.” The prose poems explore repeated attempts by the author and his mother to leave their father and husband, only to always find themselves returning, as the title implies: “This is just to say, when one leaves to quick to pack, where one goes is always back.” (from the last prose poem).
The volume concludes with “Sometimes a Man,” a series of poems in which the author, while casting a weary eye back on his parents, becomes a father to his own son. Sadly, it is also about their separation: “…who on earth talks on phones?//Just us, it seems. You and the man you haven’t hugged since you were six.” (“Phone Call to my Fifteen-Year-Old Son”). In a heart-rending turn, this journey included Sitoski becoming “a flophouse tenant drinking from a bog-warm tap.” By the very end, though, there is a kind of survivor’s catharsis, with Sitoski on a chariot wearing “flimsy laurels”, albeit with his father yelling in his ear “Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal!” (“Envoi”).
This is not always an easy read, but it is a very rewarding one, deeply felt and compellingly expressed. And there is an ultimate, unstated triumph, in Sitoski’s prevailing over all he portrays to write this moving volume.
Richard-Yves Sitoski is a poet, songwriter and performer. He was the 2019–2023 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound, Ontario, on the lands of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (treaty territory 45 ½). He is co-editor, with Penn Kemp, of Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine, profits from which went to displaced Ukrainian cultural workers, and is the author of the chapbook How to Be Human and the full-length collection Wait, What?. His one-person musical theatre piece, Butterfly Tongue, has played to sold-out houses. He is the Artistic Director of the Words Aloud Poetry Series and serves as Marketing and Publication Coordinator at Kegedonce Press. He lives in Owen Sound with his wife, Mary, and a thoroughly impossible cat, and uses guitars to make sounds unheard since the Cretaceous. www.rsitoski.com
Publisher: Ronsdale Press (September 26, 2025)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 84 pages
ISBN: 9781553807360
Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer and speaker from London, Ontario. Her first poetry chapbook was A Song of Milestones (Harmonia Press). Her first full-size collection was Hear Through the Silence (Cyberwit). Her newest collection is Emergence (Wet Ink Books). She has also published poetry, reviews and essays in numerous journals and anthologies; has spoken at numerous venues; and is the proud parent of two adult children. Website: https://jenniferwennpoet.
- Jennifer Wennhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/jennifer-wenn-2/
- Jennifer Wennhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/jennifer-wenn-2/
