Kim Fahner : Toxemia, by Christine McNair

Toxemia, Christine McNair
Bookhug, 2024

 

 

 

I’ve always admired Christine McNair’s poems, but I’ve been waiting curiously to read Toxemia for a while now. I keep an eye on which authors are releasing new books each year, so I saw this one coming a while ago, and pre-ordered it. When it arrived in the mail, I read it quickly, and then I read it again. There’s a lot that happens in Toxemia, and I wanted to do it justice by taking my time to think through the ideas that McNair presents.

If you’ve ever dealt with depression, you’ll find yourself nodding your head in agreement with the ways in which she describes that void. In “clever clogs,” McNair writes of how she managed the illusion of good health while working at a small press, creating a mirage for bosses and co-workers, but exhausted by that output of energy at the end of each day. That wears a person down over time. She captures it beautifully when she writes: “And anyways, hide it. Just hide it. Don’t tell. You know what happens when you tell.” Then, when it begins to collapse: “I fail. I fail. I fail. I consider pinning a note to the door and walking away. Just to save everyone the disappointment and allow quicker HR turnover.” She continues, writing, “It’s the loneliness. It’s the depression not quite corralled. It’s the interior aspect of intense…that falls into sharp planes. And I know it’s unreasonable. So, I control, I contain, I stay within the lines.//Until I can’t.” Those who have been there will nod their heads in agreement. They’ll recognize the place where it all crashes down.

The underlying current of depression in a person’s life is a theme that threads itself through Toxemia. McNair makes the reader think about how they might deal with insomnia, depression, anxiety, and then also think about layering in the added stress of physical health issues. Survivors of depression will recognize this dance, of trying not to catastrophize when dealing with chronic, physical health issues that are beyond your control. Too, weave in how women perceive and view their physical bodies—throughout the course of their lives—and you’ve got a problematic mix of physical and mental challenges. McNair considers the complexity of all these moving parts in Toxemia, which is why it’s a brilliant, complex, and thought-provoking book.

In the section titled “treatment,” there’s a poem titled “look,” where McNair writes about how depression is like a caul, and how “depression in the ancient world was cured with/bloodletting, baths, exercise, diet” and how treatment has supposedly changed since then, as “that membranous caul [is] still caught in eyelids.” In “loop,” the speaker says: “Mindfulness is vital. Mindfulness is crucial. I breathe through. I rage on the top of breath and on the under of breath. It latchkeys me to the moment that keeps me sane but it is also suffocating.” A diagnosis of depression often means that you need to learn to ‘manage it’ over the course of your lifetime, through medicine and therapy, along with mindfulness, while still consciously searching out and documenting the bright spots as you go through day-to-day routines.

The title of the collection, Toxemia, refers to an older medical term for today’s diagnosis of preeclampsia. It also made me, as a reader, think of how there are so many toxic elements to human lives, but particularly when you consider women’s health. When things fall apart with our physical health—and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—how do we manage, survive, and still flourish as we face chronic illness and disability? How do we face our own ableism in the face of a new disability, and how does that change the way in which we view (and live in) the world? How do we mind our mental health as our physical health becomes uncertain and increasingly problematic as we age? How do we tend to (and care for) our human selves when we’re caught up inside a frustratingly inhuman and often sexist and patriarchal medical system? So many questions, I know, and a lot of them unanswered, or answered dependent upon each person’s own experiences. Beyond all of this, what Toxemia did for me is that it made me reconsider how we—as women—define and redefine ourselves throughout the course of our lives.

McNair’s attention to craft and structure is evident throughout the collection, but one example of her keen and adept writerly ability comes in the sequence of nine poems titled “nesting dolls.” Images of the Russian matryoshka are conjured inside the reader’s mind, so that the fitting together of memory pieces makes perfect sense to a person’s search for identity and desire to document evolution over time. In this grouping of poems, McNair etches out specific memories—from a childhood trauma of being caught in an escalator, to remembrances of mental health issues as a teen, to problems in pregnancy, to a consideration of morality and legacy—so that the reader is left considering their own timeline, mapping out parallel events that lead from there to here, from then to now.

Later, near the end of the book, In “nesting doll” (now singular), McNair explores the way memory laces itself between generations of women, and how it shapeshifts in tricky ways, beginning with a sharp opening line: “I’ve been told my memories are not my own.” She then plums the depths of the power of story, writing: “I try to say—without the stories, there’s barely anything left of a person. Even if the stories aren’t entirely right, they breathe a bit of life into the flat images. Our memories are not our own. Your memories are not complete.” In each memory, in each photo that is fixed by a magnet to a fridge or taped to a wall, or posted on social media, we create a trail of story that moves from one generation to the next, and beyond.

In “nesting doll,” coming as it does near the close of the work, McNair perhaps alludes to her new understanding of her own identity as it has come to rise from family lineage and the passage of time.

Stylistically, McNair’s collection is a hybrid collage that weaves poetic memoir with black and white photographs—assorted images of historical documents and charts, medical settings, two children’s dresses, a clutch of garlic at the writer’s feet, a piece of fruit, a flower—that dovetail the text. This suits the fluidity of the text, in my mind, because the writing is so honest and raw that readers are offered glimpses into the writer’s point of view in documenting a life’s journey. It feels voyeuristic, at times, reading these fragments of someone’s life, as if you’re reading their diary and shouldn’t be doing so. It’s this draw inwards that is compelling, pulling the reader from piece to piece.

While questions of illness and mortality are present in Toxemia, there is also such a great sense of hope in the celebration of persistence, and of surviving of difficult things  It’s there in how the reader can eavesdrop on a choir singing inside a cathedral in “pacem,” and in the insistent voice of “get up,” and in “records,” when McNair writes of her husband, “And then we were we. He makes me laugh. I don’t laugh enough. Never was a kinder look. His eyes—his beautiful eyes.” Too, it is also in the “glow record” and legacy that McNair has created in her work here, for herself, and her loved ones, and perhaps especially for her children.

I suppose that’s what I loved most about this book: McNair writes of the pain and loss of control that comes with physical and mental health challenges, in how our bodies are frustrating animals (especially when we come to realize we have so very little control over them),  and still it is also about resilience, bravery, and the need to formulate connections through time and space, and in our current lives. So, Toxemia speaks to the hard-won values of persistence and survival—of managing life’s challenges—but it also rises to celebrate the tenacity of the blooming that arrives alongside the struggle. There’s such beauty in that revelation, and perhaps that it why this work is so gloriously more about growth and strength than about destruction or weakness. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for 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, has just been published by Latitude 46 Publishing. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : Oh Witness Dey!, by Shani Mootoo

Oh Witness Dey!, Shani Mootoo
Book*hug, 2024

 

 

 

 

What I love about Shani Mootoo’s new poetry collection, Oh Witness Dey!, and what I loved about Cane / Fire  before it, is how Mootoo’s work is alive and breathing on the page. Her poems take up space, aren’t anchored to the traditional margins on a page, and spread out to raise their voices and make themselves heard. The craft, in all her poetry, is clear, and the great amount of thought and care that’s put into deciding where lines begin and end, and where they dance across the page—or even when the font changes in size—is poetic architecture of the highest order. In Oh Witness Dey!, Mootoo continues with her examination of colonial violence, speaking to the way newcomers migrating to various countries must always first encounter and learn to live within patriarchal and oppressive structures, but must also, at the same time, fight furiously against them. The energy that would take is exhausting just to even imagine.

In “We,” a long poetic sequence that sits almost as a centrepiece in the middle of the book, the poet explores family ancestry, recounting an encounter with a university professor who poses ignorantly framed questions about identity. The professor asks her student what it feels like to come from other places, and then cockily assumes that she already knows the answer, just based on her own academic research: “she advises/Regale us, rather, with tales of/Contemporary Indo-indenture despair/And the cut-out mother mother mother mother tongue.” The speaker thinks, “What am I, wherever I go, if not somebody’s/forever-victim/forever-coolie?” and then poses questions of her great-great grandfather: “did you walk? how? with verve? were you /running? from what? to what? at what speed? approximate for the sake/of story—were you, for instance, panting? looking over your shoulder?” Was his departure calm, or frantic? Prepared for, or unexpected? The speaker pleads, “talk to me even if I don’t understand—and then so I understand, in hindi, bhojpuri, hinglish, whatever, just talk, pepper—or haldi, as you wish—your/my origin story with aromas, how about some recipes? hardships, hardships overcome…” Through it all, the reader is left sharply aware that the professor hasn’t given the student the space to speak, but has spoken over them, in true colonial fashion. The voice that has been erased is that of the student, the person who has the actual lived experience, and who is searching to find more parts of themselves as someone who understands diaspora from the inside.

Another theme that weaves itself through the book is the racism that is inherent to the European systems of historical and systemic colonization of the world. Mootoo’s great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad from India by the British as indentured labourers. The poet herself was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and now lives in Southern Ontario. The idea of movement, of migration and the slave trade, as well, is a current in these poems. In “Brown Girl in the Ring,” the speaker says, “Two-timer I am, infatuated/With the country in which I love/Yet yearning always for the one I left behind//I scratch my head until/Inner sores weep,” and refers to the European explorers who sailed the ocean in search of ‘new worlds.’ Those worlds weren’t ‘new’ to the people who already lived there, and so weren’t available to be ‘discovered’ as they already existed.

In “The Nevertheless Queen,” the speaker refers to Spain’s Queen Isabella, as well as to the vicious damage that was done by the Inquisition and Catholicism. This wave of brutal colonization is full of “royal fanaticism and paranoia on steroids.” The damage that is done to Caribbean nations, under Isabella’s ruin, is obvious as the poet refers to “Isa dear” as the force behind “all those expulsions, your forced conversions/The Inquisition, the burnings/The centuries you spawned of/Caribbean poverty/Blood and killing.” This historical background, so multi-layered and complex, is beautifully conveyed in Mootoo’s work, with poems that stretch out and take up space to allow the poet to explore and convey the multiplicity of historical timelines, identities, and voices of those both dead and alive.

In “Being Here,” the poet addresses her role as a settler on Indigenous land, as well, noting that displaced people from other places have come to Canada, landing and settling on First Nations lands. The poet writes: “I, too, have settled here…I, too, had not asked, nor was permission granted/What is the weight of gratitude brandished/For what’s not given, but rather, taken.” The complexity of a migrant’s place in a historically colonized country is complex, and multi-layered. Mootoo alludes to treaties on ceded as well as unceded land, writing: “I endeavour to be forever cognizant of my complicated good fortune/not as uninvited guest, not as an admitted settler mea culpa-ing/nevertheless onward/but as one who stands in every way I can with Land’s protectors,/Water’s protectors…in the struggle against, a through line of past, of contemporary/injustices/against Land, her First inhabitants, all her descendants.” Colonizing empires that invaded and pillaged continents and countries around the world ended up shifting people from their Indigenous lands, and the ripple effect is felt on a global scale with waves of migration.

Oh Witness Dey! also touches on the ways in which humans have so thoughtlessly treated the environment. In “Cosmic,” the speaker talks about her friendships: “Global, I, my circles and friends, we surely are,” moving beyond specific geographic communities and regions because of access to long distance flights and the zoom of virtual technology. Further on in the poem, Mootoo refers to “the original globalization: empire expansion,” writing of various wars, as well as the downfalls of global travel. Global warming and the climate crisis are alluded to in “Wondrous Cold,” with a poem that touches on “Air pollution from wildfire smoke” and “The castles we have built:/Nuclear, biological, chemical.” Human greed to colonize and extract natural resources is addressed, too, when the poet writes of the “Decline in bee and bat biodiversity/Pandemics bioengineered,” and the “quench” for the “insatiable hunger” of capitalism that is big business around the globe.

This collection is rich in its content, as all of Mootoo’s poetry is, so it’s a thorough and rich immersion in overlapping voices and textures that requires the reader to read carefully and listen closely. One voice might ask a question or make a statement, while another might weave itself in to show—even in the way the poet structures and lays out her work on the page—that there is not one single way of witnessing the damage done by European explorers and monarchs as they made their way around the world. So many places of origin, so many people forcibly displaced by slavery and indentured labour, and all their voices seem to speak as you read these pieces. Readers need to listen, to not speak, and then they might hear what’s being said.

In some ways, it feels a bit heretical to try and review this collection because it is all about listening rather than speaking. The reader is asked to open their mind and heart, to thoughtfully consider the various strands of identity or origin, the many movements of people around the globe through history (mostly forced upon people and not undertaken by choice or free will), and to consider the role of witnesses. As readers, we become witnesses to the speakers in Mootoo’s poems, but we also become more aware of the ways in which our own settler ancestors behaved very, very poorly. Perhaps, in reckoning with our own ancestral histories, we become witnesses to the potential of how we can hope to work together make the world a more equitable place. Oh Witness Dey! calls its readers to think through our own family histories, to listen to our own voices and stories, and to ask questions of them so that we can examine ways in which to move forward in making the world a better, brighter place than it is right now.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for 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 Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : Lent, by Kate Cayley

Lent, Kate Cayley
Book*hug Press, 2023

 

 

 

 

Those readers with Catholic backgrounds will know that the season of Lent is about giving things up, about sacrificing pleasures and things that might be excessive. Given the time we’re living in, the poems in Kate Cayley’s Lent—including the title poem—ask the reader to consider their place in the often-shallow and superficial secular world. Here are poems where attention to detail is often referenced, with a suggested connection to repetition, in a way that echoes prayer. Cayley’s long prose poem, “Lent,” was the winner of the 2021 Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, so the common themes and questions that arise in the book include an emphasis of attention to detail—in terms of being aware of the world around you—to repetition, as well as to ideas of forgiveness, sacrifice, and praise all seem fitting.

The first poem in the collection, “Attention,” sets the thematic tone of Lent, beginning with an “And if” clause that leads to “then I will believe” statement that loops the poem into a framed reflection about how “repetition could itself be/a form of attention.” Beginning with “And if” signals to the reader that this will be a piece that continues an earlier conversation inside the poet’s mind—something that has been thought about and worried through to find itself on the page. In the following poem, “Ice Sheet,” a child’s sense of wonder draws the reader’s attention to the detail of an ice puddle on a walkway: “He is/secretive in his reverent/curiosity, face bent/out of my sight. The adult has missed the wonder and curiosity, busy in dealing with the demands of a hectic daily routine, but the boy is transfixed with noticing the tiniest of details when his boot shatters the fragile skin of the puddle.

Time, and its passage, also plays a thematic role in Cayley’s poems. In “Falling,” the poet considers her son’s growing independence as he gets older. Walking home from the store, she goes one way, and he goes the other, and she watches as her son disappears around the corner. In “Blue Houses,” an elderly woman dressed in “a housedress splotched with blue roses” shuffles outside, speaking Polish “in the direction of her neighbour, who doesn’t//answer.”  The poet forecasts the woman’s inevitable death, knowing that she herself is also becoming “an exemplar of something/vanishing.” Everything is temporary, and so the reader is reminded to pay attention to the beauty in life, to praise life itself.

Often, the reader will find themselves considering how the past so easily edges into the present and future, how humans are drawn to the art of the past as respite, and how we lament the environmental losses and crimes of our current century. In the face of horror, a judge at The Hague escapes the testimony of witnesses from the Bosnian war by telling someone “I look at the Vermeers,” knowing that their painted light will save him as he faces listening to remembered atrocities. In “Red-footed Tortoise, Science Centre,” the poet reflects on a tortoise that is trapped in a false rain forest, “The tortoise, glass-boxed,/heaves from corner to corner as if the earth/could be reduced to this. As if we could be forgiven.” In “Trying to Explain Time to Children,” too, Cayley opens the poem with: “You will not recognize it. It will feel ordinary,” continuing to ponder the ways in which we notice time’s movement as we get older.

Cayley’s poems about Assia Wevill (the partner of Ted Hughes who killed herself in the same manner as Sylvia Plath), Anne Sexton, and Mary Shelley, are stunning ones. In “Assia Wevill Considers Herself,” the poet channels Assia’s voice to say, hauntingly: “Nothing here is mine. I’ve used her leavings,/fitted my hands into her rubber gloves,/her relinquished scissors.//She knows that for me nothing worked/and this pleases her.” In “Glasses,” we find the disturbing poem about the American billionaire who purchased Anne Sexton’s glasses after her death, putting them in “a temperature-controlled case/like an artifact.” The poet asks: “Does he gloat over the glasses, think about the/woman in her car?” In “Mary Shelley at the End of her Life, Recalling the Monster,” Cayley takes on Shelley’s persona as she asks the monster to take tea with her, with them dancing together at the end of the poem. They find strange solace in being outcasts—she as a woman and the monster as a monster.  

The title poem ends the collection, underlining the thematic threads that work their way through Lent. There is so much here—in the final prose piece—and in the collection that speaks to the ideas of forgiveness, sacrifice, attention to detail, wonder, and curiosity. In our noticing the details, Cayley suggests—and in the repetition and mindfulness of our noticing—we praise what we’re a part of, and so enter a type of devotion and honouring that does not find itself in a church building, but rather in the connections we make with others in community.  

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for 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 Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Manahil Bandukwala : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Laila Malik

 

 

 

 

Laila Malik’s debut poetry collection, archipelago (Book*hug Press, 2023) was named one of the CBC’s Best Canadian Poetry Books of 2023. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology, longlisted for five different creative nonfiction and poetry contests, and published in Canadian and international literary journals.

Laila Malik reads in Ottawa on Thursday, March 21, 2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.

Manahil Bandukwala: Generational connections appear across poems in Archipelago, from the grandmothers to gods. For you, how does poetry allow for conversations with ancestors and elders across time and geographical distance?

Lalia Malik: Like many other children of multi-generational migration, there has been significant rupture of documentation and oral transmission in my ancestral lines. Add to that the protective patriarchies of privacy, where the experiences and stories of some genders are held even tighter, and risk greater loss across generations.

Perhaps ironically, I was able to use that training in privacy to my advantage. By circumstance or design, I have avoided public poetic engagement and exposure for most of my life, gifting myself a seclusion that gave me space to hear more clearly all the infinite possibility across time and space.

Others will disagree ferociously with my imagined conversations. That doesn’t make their projected pasts any more authentic than mine. I have described my poetic writing as an act of loving sedition. I’m here for it.

MB: Speaking of geographical distance, the word “archipelago” evokes a sense of distance, and in some ways, a distance to be traversed. Would you consider the poems in the collection the individual islands, or the paths used to travel between the islands?

LM: I would say they’re both, depending on how you look at it. In the same way that an inverted photo can show you one reality from two contrasting perspectives, the point of the archipelago, for me, is the indisputable reality of microcosms that are interconnected – ecologically, spiritually and experientially.

MB: The question of “Pakistaniness” comes up in a number of poems in Archipelago, such as “cutlery,” “kafala,” and “crooked elbows.” For myself, I find when writing about diaspora, the amount of time and space required to articulate the nuances and intricacies of a specific diaspora can be a huge challenge. How do you approach this “challenge” in your writing? 

LM: I love the open way you framed this question.

For better or worse, my daily grind has always involved a lot of different types of writing, where technical inaccuracies have immediate and tangible consequences. While I respect and celebrate nuance and intricacy, with poetry I refuse to be beholden to anyone’s truth but my own.

In my life and in my ancestral lines, while there have been specificities of experience, the diasporas are not discrete. They are porous and fluid, as much as we try to force them into false permanencies. I’m not Pakistani – I’m Pakistani-adjacent. So I reject the idea of being true to ‘a specific diaspora’. Instead, I think of the nuance and intricacy as a type of biodiversity, in the sense that our ecologies in all their wild splendour couldn’t care less which fictitious national category we pretend defines us.

MB: Pakistani folktales have a very particular exploration of grief and love, and often culminate in death. In your poem “majnun,” you repeat the line “she did not die,” in reference to Laila in the folktale. What does it mean for you to have conversations and contradictions with folktales that are steeped in such a long cultural tradition and significance? 

LM: For diaspora in particular, where our lived storylines are disjointed and rejointed in ways that sometimes break from the traditional or dominant modes of transmission of more sedentary peoples, folktales (as well as religio-spiritual traditions) can sometimes assume a slightly coercive narrative framework of authentic possibility in our lives.  This can offer familiar emotional goalposts in the uncharted chaos of new times and lands. It can also amount to a stifling, self-imposed reassertion of ideas and ways of being that do not best serve us. Histories of colonization muddle things further – when we’ve had aspects of our cultural practice forbidden or stolen, we can become fixated with preserving or reclaiming all things, or the things we determine – in a state of reactive opposition – to be purest or most authentic.

The Laila-Majnun folktale is familiar across most of West and South and some of Central Asia. At a surface level, it is an almost pedestrian story of star-crossed lovers, found in almost every culture in the world. Clearly it resonates though, because there are a million interpretations, many related to spiritual yearning.

Grief, love and death are all important parts of life, but my contention with this defining narrative of love was that Laila is eternally positioned as object, muse and victim, with no agency and no distinguishing features beyond her participation in an infatuation, which ultimately ends her existence. This is the “bloodsucking seduction” in the poem, the “the bad metaphors, sealed sacred/with untouchable folktruths”.

But as a literal ‘Laila’ – and generally, as a human – I know experientially that we each are more than one thing. Do we have to keep dying for our bold risks and for infatuations? Must we eternally choose to be governed by the intoxication of romantic tragedy? Can we never be the subjects, the agents of our own destinies? I’m concerned with the hidden power, interests, and agendas that lie within dominant regurgitations of these folktales. If we’re going to use our cultural inheritance to inform our current lives, we had damn well better seek and claim its rich complexity so it serves us.

MB: I can hear/read the influence of a tradition of Urdu poetry in your work. Could you speak more about that influence, and also how you sustain connections to Urdu poetry living in so-called Canada?

LM: That’s lovely to hear, and in some ways surprising. While I speak Urdu, and have been exposed to Urdu poetry since I can remember, I am in no way technically versed in the art. So the influence is only semi-conscious, and in the past, I have had a somewhat bratty and completely indefensible irritation with dominant forms like the ghazal, which felt restrictive, ornate, wooden and patriarchal to me. With that said, in my youth I searched for ‘home’ in the works of Pakistani women poets, and more recently I was curious about rekhti and its rebellious foray into the feminine prosaic – until I learned that it was largely written by men in a feminine voice (although possibly there may be some historical misgendering in this description). I was, however, curious about a woman rekhti poet named Naubahar with the takhallus ‘Zalil’ (shameless).

On a related note, I’ve written in an essay on my relationship with Urdu about how the language is only a recent addition to my linguistic lineage, arriving in my parents’ generation on the heels of Punjabi and Kashmiri before that. So in some ways my ongoing interest in Urdu is almost just because it’s there, a placeholder for some other way of knowing that came before, that eternal diasporic quest for elusive answers from a past that we pedestalize. 

 

 

 

 

 

Manahil Bandukwala is the author of MONUMENT (Brick Books 2022) and Heliotropia (Brick Books 2024), and the co-author of Women Wide Awake (Mawenzi House 2023). See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

Margo LaPierre : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Sandra Ridley

Bearing Witness in Vixen: An Interview with Poet Sandra Ridley

 

 

 

 

Sandra Ridley is the author of three chapbooks and five books of poetry. Vixen is her most recent collection, published by Book*hug Press in 2023.

Sandra Ridley reads in Ottawa on Saturday, March 23, 2024 as part of VERSeFest 2024.

Margo LaPierre: You write about violence, fear, power, dread, and relentlessness with abundant care and lucidity, often in the interrogative mode. What kind of invitation do these questions extend? What questions would you like readers to ask themselves after reading Vixen?

Sandra Ridley: Thanks for asking about this. The interrogative mode is definitely purposeful.

Questioning someone (and being questioned) is felt in the body. There’s an immediate shift. And when there’s directness and clarity, there is no room to deny the meaning or its implication. In its own way, questioning holds to account the perpetrators of violence. Survivors rarely have a (safe) chance or (secure) occasion to ask anything of their hunter-stalker or violent offender. In Vixen, through direct questioning, it’s possible for the speaker to be both fiercely confrontational and assertional.

In the section titled “Thicket,” interrogations like “Does she take steps to avoid her stalker?” come from the language of law enforcement and criminal justice systems. In highlighting (or jacklighting) the notion of “victim” blaming, the questions in this section are meant to expose some of the absurd and deep-rooted biases, dogmas, judgements, and fallacies surrounding criminal harassment.

I’ve always seen the questions in Vixen acting as leg traps set to catch perpetrators (and would-be perpetrators), akin to the hunter’s snap traps that he sets for his prey. As for what I’d like readers to ask themselves? No questions. If anything, I hope that those who feel afraid, or may have ever felt afraid, will feel less alone.

ML: Did you run into any surprises or challenges while researching for Vixen?

SR: The source material on the medieval hunt, in particular the chronicles detailing fox hunting as aristocratic “chaces,” was appalling. As is the practice. It has been banned in many places, though bans are often ignored. And incredulously, fox hunting, as chase, continues to fall within the law in several countries, including the United States, Ireland, France, Australia, and Canada. These chases or field hunts have special rules. In Ontario, you can still chase red fox, raccoon, coyote, and wolf, in accordance with the province’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act.

Considering the intersection of crises and the need for practices and ethics of appreciation, care and respect, it isn’t an aside to mention that Toronto and forty-two other Ontario municipalities declared gender-based, intimate partner violence an epidemic in 2023.

Each depiction of a chase that I found for “The Season of the Haunt” felt equivalent to a real-time live stream, experienced in present tense. Gathering the details from treatises and records, then needing to integrate them into the manuscript, then rereading for revisions… with each of these steps, I was disturbed for days.

Even if the language at times works as a healing balm, Vixen needed to be filled with brutality. Because that reality exists. We’re encouraged (shamed) to not to think about it or talk about it, and even more so for the ones experiencing violence.  

What could I hope for from a reader? Would the text be asking them to experience a trauma? It troubled me that I was writing a piece that even I as reader wouldn’t want to sit with. I had never understood when someone said they felt “compelled” to write something until I began this project. But there was no other way to write it.

Like a writer, a reader will do what they can with a work. This might mean a phrase isn’t read, or that a reader slips in and out of a passage or a page, or that a book is read in entirety in one sitting. A challenge for us all sometimes in life, and in what we read or write, is in how we bear witness and how we accompany a being living with unrelenting fear and pain. Whether or not we can. And if we can, for how long. 

ML: In the collection there is a list poem, “The Beasts of Simple Chace” (which appeared in an earlier version in periodicities): the gray, the vixen, the dammula, the hind, the wilkatt, the roe, the hare, the gilt, presented from the perspective of the hunter. Would you tell me a bit of what went into the making of this section—choosing and conceptualizing these hunted creatures?

SR: “The Beasts of Simple Chace” threads three elements into an arcing storyline that cuts across time—loss of language, loss of species, loss of self. I wanted this serial poem to salvage an aspect of the essential, inherent strength from each of them.

Many of the creatures in this poem were selected because of their feminized, archaic, non-extant names. And because historically many of them were killed for the thrill of blood sport or for the bragging rights of trophy hunting, as described in my sources; in particular The Master of Game: The Oldest English Book on Hunting, by Edward of Norwich, Second Duke of York (1406). The features and qualities that this “hunter” had assigned to each creature were also captivating. In writing the serial opening foray, the upper tier of refrain for this poem, lines were taken from the Duke of Norwich, and torqued.

In reckoning the repetitive, age-old, and universal patterns of intimate partner violence, this serial piece also embodies the notions of part/whole, then/now, self/other, singular/plural, I/her, and individual/collective.

The serial or sequential form felt necessary for this material, so that the reader could uncover or recover the vital overlapping details, bit by bit. And like the pattern of violence, and through the stalker’s voice, it repeats.

ML: I adore these lines in “Thicket”: “And it sickens me, it does, and who wouldn’t despair? / There are some who don’t despair. I do not want to know them. I know them. / I do not want to know them.” Would you speak more on these lines, and perhaps on the value of feeling and writing uncomfortable emotions?

SR: Like any of our experiences, there is no requirement or guarantee that poetry will make us comfortable in an easy-chair way. I keep thinking about Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic by Jana Sterbak and about the film Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance. Uncomfortable emotions (like fear, disgust, or rage) are formidable. They can be powerful inciters.

We all hope that everyone has the same moral compass, same ethics, same values, same desires for the individual or for the collective, as we ourselves do. And it’s shocking when they don’t. Or is it?

Undeniably, there are times when we feel alone, isolated, splintered off. Sometimes we are. It’s demoralizing to come to realize that people, maybe loved ones, are unable to see the suffering happening in our world—be it up close or farther afield.

It’s worse when people can’t feel it. Not feeling it lies too close to denying it.

What’s worse than that? Someone who enjoys suffering. Someone who thrives by perpetrating it.

I worry that we’re becoming numb. We are becoming numb. With Vixen, I wanted somebody to feel something. Feeling something, even if the sensation is traumatic, means we’re still alive. And if we’re feeling alive, there’s a chance we can still care and can try to try to make this life of ours better, and by that I mean our all-creature-encompassing Earth life better. The hardest part, for me and for my work, may be finding the balance between despair and hope.

I wanted to write hope and despair. Small triumph.

And yet…

The 2020 Wild Species report produced by the Government of Canada tells us that 4,883 species or 20 percent are currently at risk of extirpation, meaning that they are vulnerable, imperilled or critically imperilled. 135 species are presumed already extirpated or they are no longer found in Canada.

Also in Canada, in 2022, there were 129,876 victims of police-reported [italics mine] family violence and 117,093 victims of intimate partner violence aged twelve years and older. “The rate of family violence was more than two times higher among women and girls than among men and boys. Meanwhile, the rate of intimate partner violence was more than three times higher among women and girls than among men and boys.”

In 2023, in Ontario, there were thirty femicides in thirty weeks from November 26 to June 30, according to a report by the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses. In 2022, the organization’s statistics showed fifty-two deaths in fifty-two weeks.

 

 

 

 

Margo LaPierre is a neuroqueer poet and freelance literary editor. She is Arc Poetry’s newsletter editor and a member of the poetry collective VII. She won the 2021 Room Poetry Award and the 2020 subTerrain Fiction Award. She is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.