Real Grownup, Elizabeth Bachinsky
Nightwood Editions, 2026
In the introduction to Real Grownup (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2026), titled “LOST THINGS,” New Westminster, British Columbia poet Elizabeth Bachinsky begins:
My MacBook crashed as I
was writing this book, and I lost fifteen pages of material. Among the lost:
the beginnings of an essay about Mary Ruefle, Lydia Davis and Proust; quite a
good draft of a poem in response to birds outside my window; whole texts prompted
by ridiculous (but fun?) conspiracies and unusual coincidences. Writer-friends
led me to believe some of this writing was humorous, or complicated, or
poignant—and even if it wasn’t (it was) I had still enjoyed writing much of it.
So there it is, or was. All gone.
Who knows what else got zapped.
Oh, yes. I’d had a breakthrough.
I’d cut and pasted most of everything I’d written over the
past few years into one place and had begun to see if I had something. I’d
pulled big things apart into little things, consolidated little things into big
things and given all things new titles and shapes. As soon as I realized the
pages were gone, I took a beat to let the cortisol flow, then got to restoring.
I’m not sure I would be able to pull off the same, more willing to simply start over in a different direction, so kudos to Bachinsky for even attempting, let alone accomplishing, this task of starting over. Apparently the late Canadian writer Timothy Findley (1930-2002) did the same, managing to rewrite and restore what became his first published novel, The Butterly Plague (1969), after accidentally losing the only copy of the completed manuscript in the back seat of a cab. At least Bachinsky wasn’t as far along.
For those unaware, it has been more than a decade since Elizabeth Bachinsky has published a book, the poetry collection The Hottest Summer in Recorded History (Nightwood Editions, 2013), a title that garnered a good amount of praise, as well as landing on the shortlist for that year’s Pat Lowther Memorial Award. The author of six full-length poetry collections, her other titles include Curio (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood Editions, 2006), God of Missed Connections (Nightwood Editions, 2006) and I Don’t Feel So Good (BookThug, 2012), and the poems and prose stretches of Elizabeth Bachinsky’s latest speaks of her own dark beginnings but from the vantage point of a further, far safer, distance. As the back cover of Real Grownup reads: “With her characteristic cheekiness and sincerity, Elizabeth Bachinsky plain-talks her way through the same gritty landscape that illuminated the poetry of her youth, but shows it from the perspective of a person at a waypoint in life, taking stock of the journey: birth, childhood, sex, loss, joy and death.” It is interesting to hear a bit of her process of note-taking and subsequent shaping of poems, what she refers to as “consolidation,” and of poems into collections; how that process has remained relatively consistent across the more than two decades of her published work. As part of an interview I conducted with her, prompted by the inclusion of The Hottest Summer in Recorded History on the Pat Lowther Award Shortlist, and posted April 3, 2014, she responded:
I am much more aware of the book as a form now than when I was younger. Writing collections like God of Missed Connections and I Don’t Feel So Good gave me the opportunity to think about the bookness of the thing, the difference between poems and collections as individual sites and experiences, both for me and for readers. I wrote my first books, Curio and Home of Sudden Service in my mid-twenties. I didn't have any idea how to make a book then. I have a little more of an idea now. But also not at all. My process hasn’t changed much. It’s still about tracking my fascinations, making a decision to do a thing and muddling until something appears. I still do it because I love to write.
There was a stretch of time that Bachinsky’s collections fell into two distinct structural threads, almost as counterpoint—the lyric narrative modes of the first-person narrative poems assembled into Home of Sudden Service, God of Missed Connections and The Hottest Summer in Recorded History (all three of which appeared with Nightwood Editions) and the more expansive, fragmented and experimental book-length collage-projects of Curio and I Don’t Feel So Good (both of which appeared with the publisher now known as Book*hug Press). The pieces across Real Grownup lean far more into that lyric mode, including pieces that sit more comfortably as prose poems, but with with the flavour and lessons of those earlier experiments clearly stitched in, not allowing the straight lyric to sit completely straight or ungarnished. As the playfully-spoken piece “PUPPETS” includes: “Rainbow Diablo eats every pink azalea / and rhododendron in the city. He misses China. / Diablo says—nom nom—whole valleys—nom nom—great walls—nom nom—I eat them all. / Zig Zag pops up and gives you the finger. Sparkle, / the little white puff with the expressive arms / and the fashionable bow tie, has a bee-yoo-tee-full / singing voice.” What I find curious is the suggestion that the notes for each of these titles were composed similarly, but shaped with and for different purpose, a different approach to project and form (and thus, different publishers). As the back cover of I Don’t Feel So Good offered:
I Don’t Feel So Good is comprised of material selected from the handwritten journals and notes of Elizabeth Bachinsky (1986-2012). Lines and passages were selected by the roll of a die and appear in the order the die saw fit. In blending confessional and procedural techniques with disjunctive chronology and random chance, this book explores and exacerbates possibilities of the narrative mode both within the text and for the reader. Not so much “written” as “received.”
The cut-and-paste aspect, as well, often moves well beyond simply utilizing her current scraps of writing, often moving back through works-in-progress well into her teens (note the dates of material in the quoted paragraph above), which I always find interesting. How does anyone find anything salvageable from such a distance? Not that anything suggests, of course, that Bachinsky purely pulls together writing into her poems elements that had been composed deliberately for that purpose, which opens the possibility that her poems might be constructed from scraps of notebook drafts, journal or diary entries, rough notes, random lines or draft-fragments of potential essays or fiction. Bachinsky works through the assemblage of her current and past threads to form shapes around her current thinking, utilized, perhaps, as prompts for her to move further and deeper through her material. As the prose poem “1971,” for example, writes:
Dad says, When I was hired as a police officer in Calgary, I made good money. He’d gotten the interview through my Uncle Larry, who was also a police officer. When Dad arrived, he says, they made him run around a track a few times, then gave him a gun. I’d believe him if I didn’t know the police interviewed everyone he’d ever met to make sure he wasn’t a communist before they hired him. Dad is always saying how easy his life has been. He says they had so much money when he became a police officer, he and Mom didn’t know what to do with it. He loves telling that story. Four hundred dollars a week, he says. We were rich!
And then they were poor.
Certain of Bachinsky’s prior collections have written of a rough and even wild suburban youth and youthful mayhem, but this collection provides more detail, citing a violence and trauma that moves across generations; a matter-of-factness to the current pieces that almost make her prior pieces in this direction seem wistful in comparison (or my own naïve reading on what hadn’t been so overt). She writes of abandonment and fathers, terrible boyfriends, addiction, poverty and escape, whether into, through or away from danger. “I had a boyfriend who found me whenever he wanted from the time / I was fourteen to when I was twenty-two,” she writes, to open the poem “GREEN DEATH,” “mostly at night, when he / was drunkest. Now that he’s dead, I can tell you about him.” She writes of moving beyond those days into developing more healthy relationships, including reconciling with her mother, and her own pregnancy and motherhood. “I turned my inside out when I had you,” begins the poem “MATRYOSHKA’S SINGULARITY” (a fantastic title and image, to be sure, one echoed throughout the cover artwork), “and saw, at last, my inside voice had shape. / My girl, you echoed out, you echoed in. / Your little hands were stars against my breast.” And yet, the experiences of her growing up, her youth, are set as rumblings that both shake through and settle the length and breadth of this collection. “These memories won’t let go,” the poem “SHAME” ends, “but I do see them from a different angle. / The child is a child like every child. The gir is a girl like every girl. / And now I am much older. Hiding nothing.” Thorugh the poems of Real Grownups, it is as though Elizabeth Bachinsky is attempting to put the details of her life into focus, into a larger context of who she is and where she currently is, and acknowledge the dark elements of her past, so that she, for her own sake, as well as her daughter’s, might move well beyond them. To begin to trust herself and her own judgement, perhaps, reconciling the times when that wasn’t the case. To mark out her own survival, and the distance she has managed to travel.
STARS
The baby started choking
on a silver Christmas garland
behind the pool table,
while
people partied
downstairs.
The baby is choking! I called
out to no one, then put
her
face-down along my
forearm
with her head in my hand.
I smacked between her
shoulder blades—good,
hard
whacks—and ran. About
halfway down the stairs,
we bumped straight into
Ann-Marie MacDonald,
mother of two daughters,
who understood
immediately
what was happening. You
are
doing the right thing, she
directed, then reached
out
to us as my daughter spat
stars into her hand.
There is a clarity to these pieces that seems different than her prior works, a further depth to layers already encountered across previous collections. “Still,” she writes, to close the opening poem, “POEM FOR THE BEGINNING,” “there are things I want to tell my daughter— / so she will know who I am and where I come from, / for also what it is she feels when she’s / in my arms. // I feel it too when my mother holds me, / tells me what a good job I’ve done.” As Bachinsky herself offers, literature is an attempt at clarity, with the suggestion that all of her books are attempts in that direction as well (something I can say I am quite familiar with, myself). What comes through in that clarity is an element that Bachinsky shares with Montreal writer and editor Sina Queyras’ remarkable book-length essay/memoir Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022), writing on how reading, and subsequently writing, isn’t simply about clarity, but possibly saved her life, as the introduction “LOST THINGS” offers, further along:
This part of myself, I’m happy to say—the part that loves books, and writing, and readers, and writers—has always remained intact. Maybe this also describes you. Even in the very worst of my addiction and lostness, I may have been living in a tool shed, or a yurt, or in the gardener’s accommodations at an organic garlic farm on the Sunshine Coast while my boyfriend took off for the mainland, but I was still reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles, you know? This is the joy of literature, it takes you away from where you are, and then you can see yourself more clearly.
rob mclennan is the author of nearly fifty published books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which is the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), listed recently by the CBC in their "Best Canadian Poetry Books of 2025" list. A further title, edgeless, a suite of long poems, will be out this spring with Catlin Press. His above/ground press, which now has a clever substack, will be thirty-three years old in July. He is the current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival, which holds its 16th annual festival from March 24-29, 2026.
