Best Canadian Poetry 2020
edited by Marilyn Dumont
Windsor: ON: Biblioasis, 176 pages, $22.95
Like Marilyn Dumont I often find myself exploring “Best” collections, not because I think the best is in the book but to see what an editor considers worthy of inclusion. Dumont’s own poetry could belong in any “best” anthology, and her selection in the latest of the acclaimed series is thoughtful and wide-ranging. In her introduction, Dumont notes that making the choices revealed her “own penchant for sarcasm.” Overall, she looked “for poems that use language to expose attitudes inherent in the English language itself, the conceptions of civilized/savage; human/nature; sanctioned/forbidden and colloquial/academic.” It’s no wonder that she was drawn to the satiric—and also the whimsical, as she also mentions.
The variety of forms in this collection is wide, from the precision of closed form in “Fig Sestina” by Dell Catherall (a husband offers his wife of 45 years a fig) to prose poetry in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s “Cree Girl Explodes the Necropolis of Ottawa” (the poem lives up to tits title) to Samantha Nock’s free verse “pahpowin” (the necessary laughter of Cree aunties). And there’s so much more. In any anthology some poems will speak more to a reader than others, but all of these poems deserve a place in the book. Perhaps the poem that had the greatest effect on me is “Salutations from the Storm” by John Elizabeth Stintzi, in part because I shared it with my students and they were awed. Stintzi describes being in the wrong body with a direct and powerful simplicity: “I’d like to see my body / with someone else in it.”
But many other poems besides the four mentioned stopped me cold, a sign that I had to recover and reflect, not plunge on to the next word gift. Jason Purcell’s ekphrastic poem “Kris Knight, The Flying Monkey, 2014. / Oil on Canvas, 24 x 18 inches” is a heart-breaker. (The painting is available on the Internet.) A boy is betrayed by another: “But then he let the story go / through the school like a flood / wetting the hems of my pants with shame.” The result is despair:
. . . Since then wanting
turned into not
wanting to want but wanting
then wanting to want then
refusing to want now . . .
Again the simplicity of the poem increases the anguish of the speaker.
The longest poem is “Weight” by Erin Soros. The lines are long, generally over ten syllables, and the four parts span fifteen pages. In her commentary on her poem, Soros says, “This poem cycles through the weight of grief, the weight of trauma, the weight of addiction, the weight of language, the weight of madness—and the opposite, how these things can seem unbearably light.” The poem begins with actual weight-lifting:
Gyms are play rooms and torture chambers and
churches; they smell of rank sweat and Ban and chalk;
they are solitude and intimacy; they are where we go
to think and not to think, to feel and not to feel.
Literal weight-lifting holds the poem’s figurative weight-lifting together as Soros delivers a kind of autobiography. The bulk and density of the poem match the motif of weight-lifting with force and elegance.
The first poem sets the tone for the rest by both personalizing and universalizing the writing of poetry. Robyn Sarah’s “Artist’s Statement” announces that she does “not speak / for the voiceless masses, no” nor other groups; she says, “I do not presume / to speak for anyone but me, / yet hope that speaks for Us.” Poetry is both individual and common. All the voices Marilyn Dumont has collected in this volume, the poems and the commentaries by these poets, can unite readers against indifference or injustice or idiocy. And that can only be good.
Best Canadian Stories 2020,
edited by Paige Cooper
Windsor, ON: Biblioasis, 2020
254 pp, $22.95
The seventeen stories in the latest collection of the “Best” series are typical of the overall endeavour: they are a combination of known and should-be-more-known writers working in a variety of styles and interests. Perhaps what is different about this volume is the level of violence, both emotional and physical.
Two stories are deeply disturbing. Naben Ruthnum’s “Common Whipping” features two young men surviving as rent-boys in Rome. Renga is a composer entranced by the work of Ennio Morricone, and he hopes to become like his idol and write music for movies. His friend Enzo works in a much darker level of the sex trade by satisfying the needs of men attracted to violence, and he sacrifices himself for Renga’s benefit. Kristyn Dunnion’s “Daughter of Cups” (winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award 2020) details in present tense how a fourteen-year-old girl is taken advantage of by a much older biker who pays her for hand jobs. Both stories are haunting.
In some way, all of the stories stick in the mind. Omar El Akkad’s “Government Slots” plays with the idea of the afterlife and what people can take with them. A scientist creates a box, a “conduit of passage” that collapses at the owner’s death. Whatever is inside vanishes. So-called “afterboxes” are amassed, with billionaires having, you guessed it, boxes the size of neighbourhoods, and other citizens boxes the size of a fist. The narrator is a janitor who works in the warehouse where the small boxes are stored. What people put in the boxes, depending on the rules where they reside, is fascinating. And no one knows what it all means.
Lynn Coady’s “The Drain” examines a TV show and the hold a character has on the showrunner, Liz. The audience hates the character and expresses fury via Twitter and other social media. The plan is to kill her off, but Liz won’t let go, to the extent that she starts “exuding” massive quantities of liquid as she forces her team to deal with increasingly ludicrous amounts of time on the character. Everyone except Liz knows she is circling the drain. Victoria, her right-hand and the narrator meets with executives who have, as she says, “Questions and insinuations—of the cold-blooded, show business variety, when everyone turns their minds from the glorious nobility of the story-telling impulse to exactly how much money is at stake.” Coady manages, as always, to use the comic to make lacerating social commentary.
The stories were written before the pandemic, but Alex Leslie’s “Phoenix” appears prescient in its depiction of another kind of disease afflicting human beings. People sleep. The narrator works in a hotel where sleepers are housed, an underfunded public facility. He describes it: “In the summertime, the hotel stifles, a grimy hand pressed to my mouth. . . . The inside of this place is the colour of exhaustion, the plate at the bottom of the sink left there for years.” No one knows why it’s happening.
And maybe that’s a linking feature of these stories—that things happen and no one knows why. People behave violently, causing harm in untold ways. Stuff happens and no one knows why. Some people cope by running away, some by not accepting reality, some by lashing out, some by being kind even to their own detriment. The stories in this collection are compelling in their exploration of the variability of human beings.
The Strangers
by Katherena Vermette
Toronto, ON: Penguin Random House, 2021
336 pp, $29.95
Katherena Vermette’s second novel, The Strangers, returns to the familiar territory of her first, The Break, in both setting, character, and tone. The place is Winnipeg, the characters are mainly First Nations and Métis, and the tone is despair. Like The Break, this novel makes for hard reading because of its emotional toll, but the reality of deeply troubled lives needs to be revealed and understood.
Vermette focusses on the lives of four women. It opens with a consideration of Phoenix, who appears in The Break. Seventeen-year-old Phoenix is incarcerated as a result of what happens in the first novel, and she’s about to give birth. While the perspective is third person, it’s clearly through the mind of Phoenix, given the language. The word “fucking” is employed, perhaps wearily over-employed, to indicate Phoenix’s fury with the world. Phoenix’s situation is bad: “Her due date was almost two fucking weeks ago. Any fucking time, was all the bitch-ass nurse said when she checked on her every morning. Any fucking time, like that was fucking helpful.” Life has been brutal for Phoenix, and it’s not getting any better any time soon.
The second main character is Cedar, Phoenix’s younger sister. The girls have different fathers, and Shawn, Cedar’s father reappears in his daughter’s life about time Sparrow, Phoenix’s son, is born. Cedar narrates her own story, and again Vermette matches the language to her character: “I wish I was excited about being an aunty, but really, what’s there to be excited about? Phoenix had a baby and it got taken away. Phoenix is in jail now. Phoenix did a horrible thing and is in jail for a long time.” Cedar doesn’t have all the issues that her sister does, especially mental illness, but she has also had to cope with social services controlling much of her life.
Elsie, the girls’ mother, is the third main character, and the dysfunctional relationships of mothers and daughters are key elements of the novel. But the family problems are exacerbated, even created, by the discrimination faced by indigenous people. Vermette includes a trigger warning at the beginning of the novel, noting “This book is about coping within the systems that have been imposed upon us (Vermette is Métis), so there are plenty of triggers for those whose lives have been traumatically affected by them.” Elsie becomes a mother at a young age and is utterly unprepared for the responsibility. The fathers are also young and irresponsible, and Elsie attempts to find comfort in all the wrong ways. She falls victim to addiction, and guilt for her perceived failures haunts her. Elsie is truly a tragic figure.
The abysmal relationship of mothers and daughters in this novel start in detail with Margaret, Elsie’s mother, but the problems likely go back much further. Margaret makes it to university, but becomes pregnant. All her plans for her life fall apart. This character’s defining characteristic is anger. She is constantly and explosively angry. She is incensed with all the men in her life and with her own mother for favouring her sons and not her. Margaret is an exhausted and exhausting character. Her mother, Angélique, is more of a mother to Elsie.
The novel is organized in five main sections, reflecting five years. In each year, the four main characters have a chapter. Several flashbacks are included. The final year is roughly the present time, so Vermette includes the pandemic. It’s one more disaster loaded onto the lives of characters already facing more than people should have to bear. But it’s reality. The heart of the novel is family, and it is the source of pleasure and pain. It helps create identity. It also has the ability to reduce people to stereotypes. The title refers to the last name of Margaret and her daughter and grand-daughter. But it also refers to the kind of relationships they have. They are strangers. Vermette attempts to provide some hope. First of all, it’s unmistakable that people live by stories. The stories people tell each other and themselves can help or hinder. Education is also seen as a remedy, and of course stories can provide education. But the addition of an extra chapter at the end to emphasize the positive effects of formal education strikes me as synthetic and forced. As a college instructor, I want, even need, to believe that education helps people, but so much has gone wrong in the lives of Vermette’s characters that a less prescriptive ending would be more believable. Let the reader hope, but don’t tell the reader to hope.
