Jérôme Melançon : The Big Melt, by Emily Riddle

The Big Melt, Emily Riddle
Nightwood Editions, 2022

 

 

 

 

An expansive longing carries the poems in Emily Riddle’s collection The Big Melt. As the speaker – a version of the poet – reaches for relations and memories, the poems reach for their readers drawing them close. Everything seems to indicate a craving for proximity, not in the psychological sense, but a metaphysical one of feeling connected and keeping what matters close. Reading this collection then is to be granted energy and yearning, to share in the determination that anchors the poems even as they open up to something infinite. Yet Riddle is direct and unencumbered by this undertaking: the titles of each section begin with “The Big,” which has the effect of indicating immensity without giving that breadth too much importance. The longing is there, simply.

In a recent episode of the podcast Can’t Lit, Riddle explained that many aspects of the poems would likely only speak to prairie Indigenous people, and perhaps most to nêhiyawak readers. I am sure there is a lot I am missing here, then. Traditional and contemporary teachings make up part of the subject and some of the form of the book – but beyond the ceremonial and the sacred, she also refers to the hockey player Ethan Bear as Maskwa without explaining that this word means “bear” and names him as a bear, making him him into a metaphor (see itwêwina: Plains Cree Dictionary). Words in nêhiyawewin abound, never explained but often expanded upon (“Learning to Count” works entirely on this form). In other places, she opens up some elements of her poems through explanatory footnotes, some of which teach historical elements, while others add personal context through stories. By doing so, she marks just how personal these poems are, how the speaker remains the writer even when the book is published (committing in the first person to write a book in syllabics).

Other aspects are hidden in plain sight: the section “The Big Prayer” features poems titled after colours, which read in order form a rainbow and tie together blood, an orange tree, the sun, a non-alcoholic mojito, herself, ribbons, and petunias, all around the idea of renewal, or more precisely the hope for and work toward renewal. Alcohol is both a he and a she, the two being more than personifications, and the narrator here prefers keeping her wits about to all three.

Most of the poems are narrative, and Riddle can really narrate, really tell. Learning of her mother’s sickness, she turns unsuccessfully to ancestors, noodles, and sex for comfort (“Worms,” 51), living beyond and beneath gratitude all at once:

you can barely say what the news is to him
he takes you on a walk up to a lookout in stanley park
and it seems unappreciative to be sad with a view of the ocean

The first line I quote here has the added effect of displaying the impossibility of sharing the news and of understanding what it could be to not have one’s whole being be affected by it, while the second evokes distance as well as the watchfulness and concern that attach to family histories of breast cancer. And the third line here renews the image of rain hiding tears at the end of the poem – a normal phenomenon in Vancouver, we are told, thus disarming the cliché then rearming the image – given the endlessness of sadness and disease.

It would be greatly unfair not to acknowledge just how funny these poems can be. Riddle uses “i am the coworker who microwaves salmon / and then eats it in her cubicle” (“Wildest Dreams,” 47) as a punchline, or “i wonder why skydaddy sent me a white girl to love” (“Blonde Love,” 18) to mark a change of direction. She laughs at the absurdity of economic reconciliatory intentions; she inserts the line “go on dates with people who go home and google ‘plains cree’” in a poem focusing on self-renewal, hair care and split ends. And she checks on the status of the treaty promise after recounting some of its violations, taking on a voice that is grandly out of place:

the sun’s shining
rivers still flow, even if they’re dirty as heck
grass appears to be growin’
since i’m still mowing it

Other poems break through the narration and become nearly theoretical, and certainly philosophical: “tell me you don’t have to die a bit inside / to be on either side of this relationship” (“Light Blue,” 29) she writes of the colonial relationship of theft and loss. The poem “it flows, but” displays at its best Riddle’s capacity for speaking at once about the personal, the political, the historical, the structural, and the philosophical. Its seventh section, a prose poem, slides from one detail of the story into another, until they all mix into the unevenness, irony, repetition, and direct harms of colonial history – from river walks to carrots to armed guards at arenas.

The collection also holds its own lessons about the multiplicity of the self and of identity, about matriarchy, and about decolonization. And these, as far as I feel and can see, are meant to be told, not explained by môniyâwak.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon is a wêmistikôsiw who writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water, is forthcoming with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.