Somewhere to Run From

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

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

Emergency Contact

admin — Mon, 07 May 2007 01:36:00 +0000

By Tara-Michelle Ziniuk

McGilligan Books

If there is a politic of poetry at stake in Emergency Contact, it stems as much from the a politicized urban landscape, as it does from the poetic representation of that setting. Against the familiar backdrop of a neighbourhood in the process of an irrevocable gentrification, Ziniuk records the objects, people and small hi-stories―perhaps otherwise unregistered―of Toronto’s west end neighbourhood Parkdale. This is not nostalgia for an idea of authenticity via poverty, but a poetic document that condemns both the past ―remembering “the holiday season when the notorious…landlords” abandoned “31 floors of families without heat or electricity for almost a week”―and the future, symbolized by the novelty shop that sells “$30 felt-letter shirts claiming “Parkdale is for Lovers.” Without an acceptable past or future, Ziniuk carves out a space in the present to search for something “more long-term than Emergency,” something that is markedly aware of the problems of contingent plans and temporary solutions (“I live my life in increments./ Trish says we should stop that.”)

Collected into four parts, this is poetry to be reckoned with. It tackles political themes like poverty, gentrification, mental illness, gender and substance abuse through a ferociously poetic vision that handles themes of love, loss and identity with as much conviction. Participating in those age-old questions about the social and political obligations of poetry, Ziniuk reminds us that “people who decide their politics are also, usually also/ the ones to leave them,” and that “anarchy is not inherently against love.”

This is poetry as the expression of a personal politics that won’t allow itself the complacency of obvious definitions yet still grants us “our distinct ability to identify one another.” The question Ziniuk seems to ask is “based on what?” The politics presented in this collection resist the facility of either/or definitions and refuse a homogeneous signification of identity even (and especially) if identity politics is central.

Idealism ends fast. I am peeling stickers that say 'Feminists Fuck Better' and 'Violence Against Women, No Excuse' off my coffee table. Not that I don’t still believe it, I just don’t need the stickers anymore.

This reluctance to buy into the rhetoric of stickers, trademarked revolutions and marketing ploys rather than the substance of a political position has particular importance at the local sex worker drop-in centre, where Jane Doe is “not here simply for the good of/ the hookers.” Rather she is a “confident, capital ‘F’ feminist, card-carrying” utterly different from the girls living “outside the system without/a card to say they’ve politics, or a joke to explain/ themselves with” and utterly foreign to the poet and politics defined by Emergency Contact.

Written by: Kate Morris, May 6th 2007