Tightrope Books

Little Venus

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Little Venus, a collection of poems by Carla Drysdale, is at once hauntingly beautiful and disturbing. The poems are an autobiographical account of child abuse, sexual abuse, and a dysfunctional family, yet Drysdale manages to strike the difficult balance between beauty and horror. As her first published book of poetry, this is an impressive debut.

Last month I reviewed Sharon Doubiago’s memoir, My Father’s Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, which confronted similar topics. Both women use the medium of poetry to work through lingering and confusing feelings of pain, betrayal, and love. While Doubiago fleshes out the details of her abuse, Drysdale weaves a portrait through short verse poems.

While many of the poems talk about her father, there are a few poems that address the refuges in Drysdale’s life. I find “New Years Eve at the Artist’s Colony” particularly moving, as Drysdale recounts the solidarity a musician creates:

He played for us—the dreamers, creators, eccentrics, the driven, the insecure, the arrogant, the labeled and unlabeled, the disowned and owned again.

I was drawn to this poem because it establishes how the experience of music, like poetry, can bring together those alienated by society. It also offers an opportunity for love and for the body to be positive. While many of the poems about her father emphasize the imposing and frightening body, in “New Years Eve” the body becomes a sensual vehicle for the music. The body is not always violent.

The truth is that these are difficult and challenging poems, reminiscent of such established poets as Lucille Clifton, Janice Mirikitani, and Doubiago. I cannot say that I enjoy these poems, as they make me uncomfortable and sad. But I would not read Little Venus for enjoyment. Rather, I would read it to recognize Drysdale’s honesty and poetic voice. These are poems like open wounds, seeking to heal and be healed.

Review by Claire Burrows

Written by: Claire Burrows, March 4th 2010

Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Phoebe Tsang

Tightrope Books

Phoebe Tsang’s Contents of a Mermaid's Purse is somewhat like a real purse a modern woman might have: familiar and, at the same time, exotic—and so is what it holds. Dumping the purse’s contents onto the table to sift through proves to be an exercise in strange beauty—an alluring siren’s call fulfilled. From the seemingly mundane poems like “My Mother’s Bread”—in which I’m intrigued to keep reading after learning that her mother’s bread is as hard as soapstone—to the fantastic, watery world that comprises almost all of the second section, Contents of a Mermaid's Purse does not disappoint.

Tsang’s work often deals with an undefined “you”, who I assume to be the speaker’s lover, though it’s unclear and may change between poems. Alluding to an other in her prose poem “Fox Fire,” she writes, “I rise early to spin stories by the kitchen window until the heartbeat murmur of footsteps begins to fall like rain at my back...”

I was talking with a friend about the collection and she asked me what I thought of mermaids in general. We discovered that she and I have conflicting ideas of what a mermaid actually is and what it represents, and my idea of one was/is more sinister than hers. So, she asked, in the poem “In Love with a Mermaid” who speaks these lines: “the spell uncast on my lips / so you wouldn’t be netted”—the mermaid or the lover? Such are the questions and intrigue winding itself through Tsang’s poetry.

As someone who likes rich, visual poetry, I really enjoyed reading Contents of a Mermaid's Purse and recommend it to those who are fond of such a bold foray into daring writing. Expect unusual metaphors and dangerous beauty, and expect to have lines haunt you long after the last page is turned. I especially liked the previously mentioned poems “My Mother’s Bread” and “Fox Fire” as well as “Black Cat,” “The Fox and the Lady,” “Blood Roses,” and “Lady Luck.”

Written by: Viannah Duncan, March 2nd 2010

Somewhere to Run From

admin — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:06:00 +0000

By Tara-Michelle Ziniuk

Tightrope Books

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk is an activist poet, critic, playwright, and performer working in Montreal and Toronto, and whose first poetry collection, Emergency Contact, was published in 2006. Her second book of poetry, Somewhere to Run From, is full of bittersweet and sarcastic poems about love gone wrong, political activism, and loneliness. There is a confessional quality to many of her pieces, which examine a wide variety of emotional topics that range from unfaithful lovers to religious persecution, blending political commentary and personal tragedy. She describes both intimate interpersonal situations and global catastrophe with razor-sharp wit.

Ziniuk's work has a straightforward quality that I found myself wanting to imitate. I was struck by her use of juxtaposition, and how simple statements become somehow more evocative with pop culture references, such as “net-speak,” and unexpected details. Her black humor adds greater depth to poems about small disasters and everyday heartbreaks.

In the prose-poem titled “How To Be Perfect Men,” she writes, “...Every sad mix CD has a song about a basement on it. We do a keyword search for 'waiting' and when I finally remember you, every song I hear makes me feel like I’m on hold...” To me, the magic of poetry is the way reading lines like these reminds the reader of their own long-forgotten mix CDs and their favorite songs about basements and waiting, re-experiencing old sadness through the lens of nostalgia, and with the benefit of hindsight.

In “Through the Night,” Ziniuk riffs on a Frank Sinatra quote:

I’m for anything that gets you through the night. A warm body/hot water bottle/Degrassi special features./I’m all for take-out in bed,/crumbs, spilled shake from the bottom of the bag,/and lipstick on pillow cases...We’re all getting old./Maybe this is what lube is for./Or maybe it’s for people who never liked each other anyway.

This brief and unexpected mention of the campy Canadian melodrama Degrassi inspires a feeling of affinity with the speaker of the poem (and by extension, the poet) in me. References like this one give the collection a feeling of an early twenty-first century time capsule. Ziniuk’s poems are full of quotable—even chantable—lines: “People only spin the bottle/when there’s someone in the room they want to kiss” or “You/give/girls/eating/disorders.”

One of my favorites from the collection is “It Must Be Stopped,” which is a darkly funny poem about a misunderstanding mother. This is a wonderful example of the range of contradictory thoughts and feelings Ziniuk’s Somewhere to Run From will inspire.

Written by: Kellie Powell, November 28th 2009

She's Shameless: Women Write About Growing Up, Rocking Out, and Fighting Back

admin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:07:00 +0000

Edited by Stacey May Fowles, Megan Griffith-Greene

Tightrope Books

Shameless is the magazine I needed as a teen. Instead, I relied on zines picked up from all-ages shows and record shops, with Ms. to fill in the gaps. Zines and Ms. have their place, but it’s heartening to see a need being met so well. In Shameless, young women have a chance to read (and write) about issues of real importance. The magazine’s title comes from its efforts to counter mainstream teen magazines, whose advertisements and features too often encourage shame of our bodies, brains, and differences.

Two of the magazine’s staff, Stacey May Fowles and Megan Griffith-Greene, have compiled the anthology She's Shameless, a slim book containing twenty-five short essays on living up to expectations, getting to know our bodies, developing relationships, learning from failures, and most of all, the power of the creative act. Most pieces are 2-3 pages long and will leave you wondering how anyone can say so much in so few words. In fact, my only complaint is that, with about 114 pages, the book ends too quickly. Contributors include previously anthologized writers, visual artists, activists, and musicians. When I read the contributor biographies I took copious notes because I look forward to reading the other work produced by these talented writers.

These stories are bravely, beautifully honest, the kind of honest that, in reading material as a teen, I only got from Changing Bodies, Changing Lives. As I read these stories, I could relate to so many experiences that I began talking aloud to the text. One story described the confusing experience of being fifteen with perfect poetry: “I had read The Story of O. But I had also just seen Disney’s The Little Mermaid.” I clapped my hand over my mouth in surprise, because I had the same pairing in my past.

My teen years were vivid, with seemingly ordinary moments transformed by Technicolor depths of pain, longing, confusion, and joy. The authors in She's Shameless let me know I am not alone in my clarity of memory. If we'd had this book, the creative women with whom I came of age would have read this anthology aloud to one another, shocked by how well these strangers could know our minds and hearts.

Written by: Lisa Rand, November 23rd 2009

Fortune Cookie

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:06:00 +0000

By Heather J. Wood

Tightrope Books

“The signs are mixed, the next twelve months could bring new challenges and unexpected changes. Moulds may be broken wild some patterns may reoccur. A shedding of skin could be on the horizon. Moments of adversity, calamity, triumph, disappointment, delight and tedium should also be expected.”

This astrological prose sums up the year of 1989 experienced by a twenty-four-year-old woman. Fortune Cookie is a diary-style novel, detailing the life of Robin, a marketing clerk for a publishing company, living in Montreal with her four friends in a two-story walk-up apartment. This book is a refreshing take on a young woman’s journey, one that encompasses the protests of the world to catalyze its heroine’s coming of age.

Robin is vicariously searching for something more in her life, and she knows that her marketing clerk job is not it. She sees standing by doing nothing as unfair justice. Her daily entries are at times interrupted with news headlines highlighting the political and social events of the year, including Tienanmen Square, the Chantal Abortion case, and the Montreal Massacre. Also mixed in are astrological musings loosely based on the Chinese calendar.

This book reminded me of the feeling I got when I decided to take action and become involved in my community around the issues that mattered to me. Robin experienced this same feeling while watching the Tienanmen Square protest and the abuse taken by police on television. Fortune Cookie is a novel that brought back memories of the No. 1 song of the week, like Milli Vanilli’s “Blame it on the Rain” and the Berlin Wall coming down. Towards the end of the year you get to find out what Robin decides to do at the start of the twentieth century, which is an amazing journey of self-discovery.

Written by: LaToya Rogers, November 12th 2009

Bone Dream

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:00:00 +0000

By Moira MacDougall

Tightrope Books

After an encounter with the divine, even dreams must seem mundane and tiny, despite their distance from everyday reality. "After Cupid, Psyche begins to grind/the left-over mice bones of her dreams." These two lines, with which Moira MacDougall begins the first poem of Bone Dream, illustrate the central dilemma of the collection, which is also the origin of its power: that extraordinary experiences may also be ordinary.

In many of MacDougall's poems, this paradox appears most clearly in the final turn. The little girl who narrates "Hope" expresses in the last two lines the desire that her father would love her "as much as he loved his god." On one level, this is the ordinary wish of a young girl to be the center of her father's world. On another, it is an astounding aspiration: to be, in some respect, like a deity. "Sky" is more subtle. The tale of a family's typical summer outing ends with a camera "framing shadows." It is as though their bodies have disappeared, which is both wondrous and eerie.

MacDougall does not always wait until the conclusion of a poem to weave the unusual into the usual. In "Double Vision" the first stanza introduces the image of elbows-as-eyes. Because it is said in the voice of the little girl and a simile is used, this transformation of body parts comes across as merely the product of a clever child's imagination. The second stanza develops it more and drops the "as if" so that it comes to seem literal. The ordinary leads into the extraordinary.

Similarly, a sequence dealing with ballet makes the ethereal dance form a matter of bodies, especially bodies painfully disciplined. The first of these poems focuses on a dance teacher's gnarled feet. The last compares learning to wear pointe shoes and the other accoutrements of a ballerina with ritual embalming, thus adding spirituality while further emphasizing the body.

Despite the skill with which she brings together the ordinary and the extraordinary, MacDougall stumbles when writing about people unlike herself. She describes, briefly, the life and death of a dwarf in "Small Bones," but does so through the her own eyes and the eyes of others around him, as though this individual's subjectivity were less important than how others felt about him. He is treated not as a person, but as a symbol whose tiny skeleton echoes similar images in other poems.

Further along, in "Rituals of Healing," she writes, "A rabid, vegan idealist loses his right arm to the hijinks/of his adolescent daughter playing with a forbidden firearm/All that intellectual integrity shredded, then withered." She creates a stereotypical character in order to subject him to a supposedly ironic fate.

Still, Bone Dream remains a strong meditation on the connection between the usual and the strange, the embodied and the physical. Moira MacDougall has found a distinct way to explore a life in all its strangeness and familiarity.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Elizabeth Kate Switaj, October 8th 2009