Wait, What?, Richard-Yves Sitoski
Wet Ink Books,
2022
Richard-Yves Sitoski’s new book, Wait, What?, is a collection of memoir poetry that documents the poet’s struggle with mental health issues. Sitoski is adept at crafting sharp, witty turns of phrase, and has fashioned a book-length epigram that gets at the core challenges of living with mental health concerns. The collection is divided into three parts—Fundament, Employment, and Derangement. These are short pieces, with the longest length of poem in the book being just seven lines. With few lines and strong imagery, Owen Sound’s Poet Laureate (2019-23) has stylistically created a book that holds weight, that presses down, and that makes the reader consider how often mental health concerns are swept under rugs, referencing how poorly patients are treated within our health care system. You can’t turn your head and look away because each poem demands that you pay close attention. Avoidance is something that causes problems rather than solves them, and Sitoski aptly skews the notion that ‘ignorance is bliss’ in a society that still stigmatizes mental health issues. In many ways, Wait, What? is a way to document a difficult journey, but is also a passionate call to action.
The book begins with a trigger warning for self-harm, so that the reader is made aware that the material will be difficult to handle in places, but it starts chronologically (and logically) with “Conception,” as the poet writes: “Does it not make sense that I remember/the moment of conception? I was there.” Sitoski establishes a quirky, storytelling tone that carries on with poems like “God,” as he imagines God living in a space station: “God’s been in orbit so long/he’s lost all bone mass.//Look at him, floating there./So small I could put him in a jar.” While the first section of the book, “Fundament,” deals with childhood and youth, the second section of the book, “Employment,” records the trials of working people. As the speaker ages, the focus of the collection shifts. In “Rot,” Sitoski uses evocative imagery, writing of tomatoes that “expire of melancholy,//onions of senescence, avocadoes in a hospice,/and pears, like you,//contused by self-deprecation.” In “Essential,” there is a reflection on what jobs do to people, sometimes making us feel “necessary but ignored,” something a bit like “the text/on a fire extinguisher.”
The most challenging section of Wait, What? is the last one, “Derangement,” which depicts a journey through a broken mental health system. As things begin to unravel, the imagery sharpens. In “Book,” Sitoski writes: “I was trying to read/when a robin crashed into my window.//Only by robin I mean my voice/and by window I mean the sea.” Boundaries between worlds begin to dissolve. The emotional back and forth of trying to heal as a mental health patient is clearly depicted in “Feelings” when the poet writes: “Yesterday I felt like confetti, the day before/like a cinder block.” In poems like “Diagnosis,” “Waiting,” and “Problems,” Sitoski captures what it’s like to be in a psychiatric ward. In “Eating,” there are patients who “eat looking down/because, in their mute way, they are saying//they’ve forgotten what type of music/once made them happiest.”
Afterwards, shifting into a life outside of the hospital, there is the sense of a teeter-totter as the newly released patient tries to deal with follow up counselling and finding employment. The last poem in the book is titled, “Freedom,” but it doesn’t promise continual freedom: “I am free, if by freedom you mean/a million tons of snow cascading down a mountain//and covering your cabin.” Those who have dealt with mental health struggles will recognize the balancing act of healing and getting stronger.
A Don Gutteridge Poetry Award winner, Richard-Yves Sitoski’s Wait, What? is a collection of poems that will unsettle the reader, and rightfully so. These are clear-voiced and well-crafted poems, and the poet is adept at turning phrases with quick wit and intelligence, and with compassion for self and others, too. The fragments and memories of a life become poems filled with surreal and sometimes visceral imagery. Wait, What? suggests that the journey of a life isn’t ever easily mapped or documented, but also reminds the reader that it’s crucial to reflect on the passages through darker spaces in life, to become more aware of the places where light lives.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury,
Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac
House, 2022). She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada
(2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of
the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim’s first novel, The Donoghue Girl,
will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached
via her author website at www.kimfahner.com