Melanie Marttila : Ajar, by Margo LaPierre

Ajar, Margo LaPierre
Guernica Editions, 2025

 

 

 

This poetry collection is an intimate and vulnerable poetic memoir of what it’s like to experience the haunting fracturing of self that often results from mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder II with psychotic features.

That’s the diagnosis Ajar by Margo LaPierre both spirals toward and away from. The poems in this collection reflect a fracturing of thought, language, self, and of time itself. The phrase “I haunted me” repeats throughout the collection. Having contemplated suicide, having attempted it, she is intimately linked with death and the ghost that returns from that future death haunts her: “The future predicted itself, and I haunted me, / Briefly I thought other ghosts haunted me, but it was just me.”

The story LaPierre tells in this collection is non-linear, or perhaps more appropriately, alinear. Time agnostic? Events do not emerge from one another or grow organically so much as appear and surprise.

The self-haunting is not the only recurring motif. Substance abuse, dissociation, surviving gendered violence, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide all iterate. Also, a variety of metaphorical representations of the self or parts of the self appear: a grapefruit (perhaps the grapefruit), sliced bread, a grasshopper, a mongoose, hibernating bears.

But Ajar is not the chaos it might appear on the surface. Rather, it is a constructed chaos. LaPierre is an architect of verse, using the principles of visual design to inform her poetry.

I attended her workshop in the League of Canadian Poets’ Fall Poetry Intensive and LaPierre is intentional about every word and line she writes. When she discussed revision, she said she put additional lines and comments in italics throughout Ajar while editing … and left them in the final manuscript because they added meaning or context.

Evidence of this careful construction are the four cento poems included in the collection. Cento comes from Latin and means “patchwork garment.” It’s a poetic form composed of lines, phrases, or fragments borrowed from other poets and authors, collaged together to create a new, original work which recontextualizes existing literature to create new meanings, irony, or homage.

LaPierre cites the poets and their works both after each cento and in the notes, including lines from the poems by Frances Boyle, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, MA|DE, Hollay Ghadery, Liz Howard, Doyali Islam, Therese Mason Pierre, Kim Fahner, and many others.

That the four centos are “… for Psychometry,” “… for Pyrokinesis,” “… for Clairvoyance,” and “… for Immortality” is no accident, either.

Finally, to circle back to my first thoughts, Ajar as a whole is a kind of “patchwork garment,” and LaPierre recontextualizes her poetry for us with her recursions and rich metaphors and commentary.

Ajar is a collection that rewards careful study and thoughtful reading, at once harrowing and comforting.

 

 

 

 

Melanie Marttila (she/her) is an #ActuallyAutistic author-in-progress, writing poetry and tales of hope in the face of adversity. Her poetry has appeared in The /tƐmz/ Review, Polar Starlight, Sulphur, and her debut poetry collection, The Art of Floating, was published in 2024 by Latitude 46. Her short fiction has appeared in SuperCanucks, Through the Portal, and Pulp Literature. She is a settler writing in Sudbury, or ‘N’Swakamok, on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, home of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and the Wahnapitae First Nation, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.

Kelly Terwilliger : Notes from the Field: Eugene, Oregon

 

 

 

There’s one outside my door, a field,

because I don’t mow it.

Not until later, after the daisies. And the fawns.

 

The daisies come first. Then the fawns around the first of June, speckled white, as if daisy-strewn.

 

It’s late May now: Oxeyes in their glory. Wild iris just gone. Wild roses, full on: small fragile ones.  Invasive stinky geranium on the rampage, and poison oak, profuse, more confident, complacent each dry year we come through.

 

And the grasses: high and plumy, sending off their pollen. (Today the pollen count was 1005. Low is 0-4; moderate 5-19; high 20-199, and very high 200+.

This world! We need a new word.)

 

But it won’t be long until strawberries.

And the end of school, and the migration

of students, all ages, into other ways and places of life.

 

And poetry? Where is poetry in Eugene in June?
 

Summer’s pause is fast upon us:

Windfall’s monthly reading at the library ends in May

Studio 7 won’t host poets again until September

Wordcrafter’s open mic concludes in June

University sponsored readings, done for now

 

Poet Laureate Ada Limon’s praise of poetry and paying attention has come and gone. Kindergarten has concluded the monthly chant of Chicken Soup with Rice.

In May                                                  

I truly think it best                         

to be a robin                                  

lightly dressed                      

concocting soup                     

inside my nest.

 

Now: Hiatus.

Now we all run outside and shout poems into the    blackberry brambles and wind. Why not?

 

Because they keep coming, the poems. The Red Sofa Poets go on meeting and critiquing. I imagine their sofa: velveteen, a little worn, with ample, shapely arms. The Breakfast Poets nibble their morning fruit and write. Tough Crowd, Poetry 1, Haiku-a-go-go. The groups continue to gather. Solitary unnumbered others write and dream in their own secret places. R sings extemporaneous poems alone in their basement apartment; H makes poetry into songs and sings them later in back yard concerts with a back-up band.

 

A local literary magazine, pronounced dead in1992, revived this year: Emergency Horse, revenant, irreverent. Cantering, snorting, munching new grass.

 

The Northwest Review, too, has reinvented itself, online this time. Set to celebrate its first issue, maybe every issue, somewhere live.

  

The Hult Center for Performing Arts will have a second spoken word open mic this month. The first, in January, to rave response. Don’t bother signing up--all the folks left out last time have already filled the list.

 

More unfurling. Poetry happens here in galleries: Karin Clarke, White Lotus, Maude Kerns. The long-established Tsunami Books hosts readings galore, and Hodgepodge, the new bookstore/bar on East 14th, has a regular open mic and a Poetry Book Group meeting on their chalkboard of events. Poetry at The Wine Lab, among the workspaces of Whiteaker Printmakers. Poems performed at the once-church-turned-movie-theater-turned Art House.

People and poems meet in coffee shops (Theo’s, Vero’s, The Lovely Café, Perugino’s, Hideaway). 

At little free libraries perched on street corners, in front of houses.

Poems speak from park benches: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees/and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything/which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes (e.e. cummings)

Poems go for walks. On the name signs of each city park in Eugene:

In the spring at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. (Margaret Atwood, Lafferty Park).

 

 

 

 

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
(W. H. Auden, Amazon Dog Park). 
 

(I have to admit: I don’t usually look at name signs in parks. I just arrive and tumble in—but see what I’ve missed? What I get to seek out? What you could too, if you came here? A treasure hunt of poetry all over town.) 

Poetry in a grocery store. On the walls above where anybody really looks. Mostly food and wit, not always poetry, but how about this—

what garlic is to food, insanity is to art

To read it, you have to look up from your grocery list, away from the carrots and beans and eggs and dogfood. Who interrupts an errand and does this?  It feels like stepping into poetry just to pause and look around.

Keep going—and pausing, and looking around—

On the 26 stops of the EmX bus line in West Eugene:

26 poems, engraved on steel.

In the Mahlon Sweet Airport, a self-serve kiosk at the top of the escalators: push a button and poem on a tongue of ticker-tape paper unrolls from a slot.

In the parking Garage on 10^th and Oak: poems, each level.

At the Eugene Saturday Market, a busker sets up a typewriter. Ask for a poem and he’ll type one for you while you wait.

A man at the corner today, needing money, holds up a piece of cardboard: Same problem. Different Day.

 

The trains hoot and ratchet their passing poems.

The shouts of kids in the park, the little hiss of bicycles.

And this week from the bark path through yet another field:

the crickets, chirping in verse.

The black-headed grosbeaks. The yellow warblers.

The pacific wrens in the woods.

At Fern Ridge Reservoir, a multi-vocal poem of toadsnore

and bittern gulping, redwing blackbird, marsh wren, goose, yellowthroat, swallow and purple martin

all reciting their lines above the grasses.

 

(Did you know—researchers have found that some

species of mice sing complex lines in response to each other? This occurs at frequencies beyond human hearing. Such poetry cannot therefore enter these notes with certainty. Let’s just say probably, and not just mice.)

 

Dead snake made a poem on the gravel road.

 

Broken glass another one.

 

And then brief rain descended this afternoon.

 

My friend laughs. There’s almost too much poetry

in Eugene.

 

But no, never—the field is raggedy and wild and full

of complicated life. To sing, to praise, to revel, to lust, to feel alive. To grieve, to rage, to suffer, to heal, to put to rest. To muse, unhitch the mind, to plumb down deep, to send us somewhere new. Why trim back, why limit, why mow too soon? Why should anyone miss the bit we’re briefly in? Because even when it’s hard it’s what we’ve got.

 

I’m still waiting for the fawns. I hope they come again. They might not. There’s always that chance. Things change, falter, die, transform.  But if they do arrive, I’d like to show you the poems the fawns make racing across this field. I wish you could feel them, hear them, these giddy just-born poems-with-legs. I wish you could, for a minute, be them. Here in Eugene, or wherever you are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kelly Terwilliger lives near a field and a forest in Eugene, Oregon. She is the author of three collections of poetry, A Glimpse of Oranges; Riddle, Fishhook, Thorn, Key; and Night Maps. Her newest book, Endnotes, is a combination of poetry, prose, and paintings. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, and Britain, including december magazine, The Baltimore Review, The Comstock Review and The Amsterdam Review, and she won first place in the Guernsey International Poetry Competition—which means her poetry has also adorned buses and an airport in the Channel Islands. In addition to writing, she teaches and performs as an oral storyteller and likes to swim in wild places whenever she can.

Wioletta Greg : Five poems, translated by Kasia Jaronczyk

 

 

Lessons in Astronomy

                                     for my son

 

The middle-aged woman, your mother,
one day will tell you, that while reading
a paper on the origins of the Solar System
on the deck of the Wootton Bridge Inn,
she glimpsed spectres of timeless planets
in the eyes of gillyflowers.
And a snail traced the Milky Way
on a paper napkin. 

That day, the great heron eggs hatched in the floodplains,
and the sky was so clear
that she could ask it for answers
you sought in your astronomy books,
but she preferred to watch the road
where a speeding lorry
branded with ‘Starway’ crushed
wild apples on the asphalt. 

 

Spithead in November

  

After the storm, the tide recedes.
The pier dissolves in the fog.
On the beach, ravens devour mussels
smashed against the stones. 

I stroll along the silt-coated
levee, counting ships, and suddenly
in the fissures of the grey sea wall
discover thousands of green, living snails.

 

 

Boys Selling Lemonade

They live next door, on my housing estate.
Their grandmother is dead, dad’s locked up,
Mum’s benefits barely cover food,
the cheap wine she sips in secret
listening until midnight to Lady Gaga’s song

from A Star Is Born: ‘Tell me somethin’, girl,
are you happy in this modern world?’

In the morning they carry empties to the shop,
buy lemons, sugar, sparkling water
and in the damp kitchen prepare lemonade.
It’s raining. Only seagulls feast by the rubbish bins
on the estate. The wind knocks over the table,
flaps the tablecloth like a flag of an unknown country. 

I pay them a pound for a cup and, sipping the drink
that tastes of soap and sour rainwater,
I remember how, during summer holidays,
I stood by the road selling cornflower wine
I had fermented on a windowsill,
and on Śmigus-Dyngus^[1] I topped up perfume
with ditch water and sprayed the neighbours
for some money, an Easter egg, or a candy bar.

 

 

The Lullaby

 

Sleep – tomorrow will bring Polish TV,
a pack of fags on the doorstep.
A fairy godmother will top up the coin-shower,
and you can relax under a hot stream.

Sleep! A rivulet of cider flows across the floor.
The lit joint transforms into the fern flower^[2].
Your dreams come true. You will return home. 

Sleep! You will stop drinking, leave the farm
where stems cut your hands,
and teatime is sacred.

Sleep! The nights on the promised island are shorter.
The alarm clock shrieks at five in the morning.
Your bicycle, stiff with cold, waits by the gate.
Will you go mushroom picking with grandpa?

 

 

The Pear                                              

                                                                for Maciej

 

I stole it from Virginia Woolf’s garden
on that rainy day,
because it reminded me of the scent of your skin;
I furtively slipped it into my pocket
while tourists photographed
the flower beds and waterweeds in the pond
and took selfies by the writer’s grave. 

On the way back along the banks of the River Ouse
I clenched my hand around the cold fruit,
remembering our trip to Rodmell:
the cows on the path and our dog barking –
he was supposed to be our only child,
but died a few months later. 

There is a kind of silence when
the ticking of a clock
becomes the rattle of train wheels,
you leave the station door ajar
and stand before me with a bouquet of roses.
For a few seconds time suspends
in the flesh of a rotting pear.

 

 

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[1] Śmigus-Dyngus – a Polish Easter Monday tradition in which people playfully splash one another with water to celebrate spring and renewal.

[2]The fern flower  – a mythical Slavic plant said to bloom only on Midsummer Night and grant luck or hidden knowledge to whomever finds it.

     

 

Wioletta Greg (Wioletta Grzegorzewska) – a Polish novelist and poet. She is the author of several poetry collections, and four novels: Secret Cloud Conductor, Wolf River, Additional Soul, Accommodations (trans. by Jennifer Croft), and Swallowing Mercury (Guguły, trans. by Eliza Marciniak). Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Slovenian, Korean, Welsh. Her books have received wide international recognition. Her poetry collection Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance (Arc Publications, UK; trans. by Marek Kazmierski), was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada, one of the most prestigious international awards for poetry. She was also longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2017), and shortlisted for, among others, the Prix Pierre-François Caillé, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Nike Literary Award, the Gdynia Literary Award, and the Michalski Prize. She is the recipient of the Golden Owl Award in Vienna, and the Majewska Prize (London, 2022). She lives in Great Britain.

Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer, artist and microbiologist. She immigrated to Canada at the age of 14. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her stories were short-listed for the Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010. She has published in Canadian literary magazines such as TNQ, Room, Prairie Journal, Carousel, The Nashwaak Review, Postscripts to Darkness, and in anthologies Wherever I Find Myself. Essays by Canadian Immigrant Women (Miriam Matejova, Ed. Caitlin Press, April 2017) and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (2016. Vol 9.). Find out more about Kasia on her website: https://kasiajaronczyk.weebly.com/