Pattullo, Catherine Owen
Alfred Gustav Press, 2020
14 ways a chapbook is like a bridge
1. a combination of materials – asphalt, enamel, steel – a synthesis – paper, staples, words
2. trace opaque pages delicate as paint flakes of “that strangest / orange, of both rust and happiness”
3. the arch from “Slim / City to Sprawlsville” takes you away or back home, depending on which side of the poem you reside
4. “Obsession is what the bridge urges,” transforms language, steals your breath as you raise beam high over the muddy current, “the world beneath, / a cradle, upturned”
5. biker bar or royal arms, the “cheap…trysts or beer;” poetry spending “life on a lever beneath warrens of steel”
6. “why does it have to be that, a human yearning?” both the bridge and the chapbook have the answer but neither one will tell
7. the poems burn (no creosote needed)
8. how many deaths can a river hold? how much affection between the letters of a word? “Nothing will compensate for their loss. / Nothing ever does”
9. “how much longer [can I] work towards convincing us history matters”? the bridge asks no one in particular
10. the rivets refuse to become “yet another / forgotten volume of Canadian poetry”
11. bring on the “lattice of another kind of Canada” – I think we’re all ready (except maybe the ghosts)
12. we are “littered with ribbons loosened from last bouquets”
13. chapbook & bridge are “something other / than point A to B – which is really what you fear – like love.”
14. architecture is engineering fourteen lines into a crown
