Anstruther
Press, 2020
Unlucky
Fours (Anstruther
Press, 2020) is poet Ellen Chang-Richardson’s debut chapbook. Chang-Richardson
is of Taiwanese and Chinese-Cambodian descent, and is based in Ottawa, where
she is the founder of the Riverbed Reading Series and Ottawa/Toronto-based
Little Birds Poetry editing workshops.
This
is a slim chapbook consisting of eight poems, most under half a page. The poems themselves are numbered and elusive
abbreviations – “I. It begins with S –”, “III. A.”, “VI. D.S.”, and so on. The
acknowledgements thank people by their initials, and so the titles then become
suggestive of people, particularly given their structure:
They say that this is what it means to be Canadian:
a rite of passage, practiced rote through our
parents’ histories.
As I repeat the
steps
I watch you
fish
the St. Lawrence.
(“VI.
D.S.”)
None
of these poems are long; the longest, “VIII. R.E.”, makes use of a full page, half
of it empty; the poem itself, a meditation on containment, dis/comfort, and
sleep, uses the space in and between lines to echo the speaker’s just-woken
confusion and turn towards a final dream of Revolution.
Unlucky
Fours is
spare, a small chapbook of small poems, and Chang-Richardson is a skillful
manipulator of punctuation, space, and break, as in “Mid—nights, my heart can’t
breathe”, she writes in “II. K.P.H.D.”, or:
Listen very carefully.
Do you hear the leaves in the stillness?
That is the earth settling
into
its nightly rest.
(“V.
S.C.S”)
Involuntarily,
I find myself holding my breath.
Throughout
these poems, the speaker is caught between worlds – whether dealing with memories
and an emptiness that expand “like the remnants of a Soviet hangover” (“II. K.P.H.D.”),
or speaking of how speaker and addressee “hack back / to the annals of our ancestry”
(“VII. A.B.U”). What does it mean to
exist in a place, not fully accepted, where one is, “Immigrant, alien, anarchist.
// Cut through / with glances, with stares” (“VII A.B.U”), and where the echoes
of our past grow fainter and deeper, as in “III. A.”, when the speaker says, “I
excavate my mother’s mother’s stories, // momentarily.” There are no easy answers, only the slow
progression of experience.
Chang-Richardson
describes herself as an emerging poet, but this is not an uncertain,
feeling-out debut: the voice of these poems is assured, the subjects only
beginning to be explored, and this collection marks what I expect is the beginning
of a long poetic career.
Julian Day is a
poet and software developer living in Winnipeg. His work has recently appeared
in Juniper, and is forthcoming in EVENT.
