Micheline Maylor : Notes from a Small Publisher: Frontenac House Press

 

 

 

 

Founded in 2000 by Rose and David Scollard, and acquired by Neil Petrunia, and his wife Terry Davies around 2013.  I’ve acted as senior acquisitions editor there since 2013 and recently added the talents of John Wall Barger to the editorial team. We’ve focused mainly on poetry and solely Canadian works since the founding of the press. We look for manuscripts that say something new, while attending to the craftwork of poetry.
          I believe that Canada has its own literary voice distinct from its foundations as a commonwealth of the British Empire, and distinct from our America friends. We must. We have different concerns, values, and culture, distinct from both behemoths that flank us.
          Poetry has trends and schools, as do music, the visual arts, and film. At the moment, as Canada grows into itself, we are immersed in “voices of identity”. This creates gateways into worlds we cannot inhabit ourselves, and, hopefully, increases our capacity for understanding and empathy. It also can underscore our differences and increase tribalism.
          But what I’m most fascinated with is the existential commonality that exists in our humanness, and our common capacity for as Blake says in Auguries of Innocence, “the world in a grain of sand.” And I find myself increasingly drawn to existentialist phenomenology coupled with surreal metaphor. Poems the speak to common emotion and experience through description and experience embodying the commonality of humanness filtered through surprising language and imagery.
          One of our authors, Tyler Engstrom, published his debut collection with us, Think of How Old We Could Get, and I look forward to more from him. His work is mainly written in prose poem, with short scenes of high cinematic images and a punch of emotion. His voice is absolutely unique. I hope to see more from this promising writer in the future. I’d especially like it if some upcoming filmmaker would make some short films of his work. Hint, hint, out there. Here’s his poem “Crying Men” from Think of How Old We Could Get (2021) 

Crying men

I stuck my hand out the window
and made it a plane in the wind as we approached the gas station,
a pock mark on an otherwise naked body to run rubber on.
I walked in and the station attendant asked me,
“Do you believe in God?”
I told him no, or maybe when the moon seems right
and I need something more fitting to a poem than
believing in nothing.
He took me by the hand and we walked out back into the field
behind the station where I imagined someday wild horses had run free
and he asked me again
and I told him only when the wheat we pass through
becomes bread and wine will I believe the word of God
and he took my hand again and kissed me on the mouth.
We both tasted like cigarettes and I said still, no,
but he cried and I don’t do well with crying men.
He said God told him the next man would be beautiful
and tell him what he needed to know.
I told him I was not a beautiful man.
He said yes, but he hoped I might do
so I laid him down and told him,
“There is a hole in your heart no God can fill.”

I came back to the station and you were waiting there
with a soda in your hand and the tank full
and you said, “Who do we pay?” 

“Nobody, we’ve already given so much.”

It started snowing a few minutes later on the road
and you told me my eyes looked like Lake Louise. 

Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate emerita of Calgary (2016-18). She was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award for literary contributions to Alberta in 2022. She is the senior acquisitions editor (poetry) at Frontenac House Press. She is a Walrus talker, a TEDX talker, and she a past Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). Her most recent book is The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021) won the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for best book of Alberta poetry and has been translated into Italian La Cattiva Moglie (iQdB). Her latest appearance introduces Hunger: The Poems of Susan Musgrave (Wilfred Laurier Press. 2025).

Kim Fahner : The Bad Wife, by Micheline Maylor

The Bad Wife, Micheline Maylor
University of Alberta Press, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

Read Micheline Maylor’s newest collection of poems, The Bad Wife, and you will feel as if you’re overhearing something private and intimate. The confessional tone of the speaker is honest and fresh. Maylor opens with the powerful poem, “How to Become a Bad Wife.” The suggestion is to start “with the archetype of innocence,” but then to “Turn dark after the vows. Wait until after the first born and the second born./Secure your sweetness in their DNA.” After the marriage begins to fall apart slowly, there is “the rock-slide of your own heart” and the speaker recognizes that she has become “an unreliable narrator.” In “The Crow Gives a Body,” the reader realizes that a marriage can be “gone, speckled shrapnel in clover” and become a “set of telling ruins.” After the affair, “Divorce Sudoku” speaks to the unexpected fall out after the end of a marriage. There are “columns of expenses,” “new shoes for daughter,” and “gym credits for son.” Soon enough, there is a bird in the house, friends asking questions, and “the bad wife” is left trying to figure out how she should begin again.

Throughout the collection, the poet writes about what it means to live a more vivid life, to live in the moment. In a marriage that has become stale, with partners no longer communicating, one or the other might feel compelled to dabble in infidelity, or to leave, or both. In “Your Motto,” the story of how the speaker is hit on by a man other than her husband. She says: “I wanted you to love me so hard,/that he didn’t have space to demand I go home with him./I wanted you to love me, but you were too busy laughing.” In “(N)ever Thought,” there is tell of another party and the speaker says: “Over there in the corner, you eye the trespasser./He drives right into your marriage and you watch.” There is a sense that this husband is oblivious to the rather wretched state of his marriage, perhaps having taken it for granted for too long. Everything wears down and, sometimes, things are irretrievably broken. If spouses can’t even talk with one another, or hear one another, or laugh, or make compromises, it seems almost impossible that a marriage could—or should—survive.

There must be both sadness and relief in knowing that it is best for a person to leave a relationship that no longer feeds them spiritually, mentally, emotionally, or sexually. The chaos leading up to it, the demise of a marriage, must be wrought with confusion. Then, to emerge as more of oneself, as a woman, must be like having walked through fire, and then to be reimagined in some way, shape, or form. In “Prologue: On Our First/Last Toast,” Maylor writes three astute lines: “Here’s to you, to me,/If ever we should disagree,/Fuck you, and here’s to me.” Overall, The Bad Wife speaks to the importance of how we take time to come into ourselves, and how we navigate the destruction of relationships that once fed and nourished us, but now no longer do so. How does a person manage to stuff down their true self to suit a societal convention that may no longer suit most people? How are they brave enough to think of themselves, and of how short life actually is? There will always be collateral damage, which is what The Bad Wife seems to say.

A beautiful long poetic sequence, “Omen: Calla Lilies,” fills up the last part of the book. The poems in this section spread out across the pages, taking up space and stretching out in almost yogic fashion. The speaker says, “I tried to be a good/communicator./I said, I need you to love me.” Their spouse’s lack of response is answer enough: “I asked you to love me and you said,/no./You didn’t say no with one syllable.” Instead, they “took many more,/pantomimed when necessary,/acted it out, one complacency at a time.” The speaker gives voice to what’s been unspoken for too long: “loving me was what you should have wanted./What you should have been capable of.” Maylor writes, tellingly, “Call it the snow globe year./The year I cracked the big glass ball with all the people inside, my people” and they “fell in with all the shards.” One of the most brilliant lines of the collection is: “Say goodbye to the electric panel of my heart.” At the end of a marriage, the speaker says “it’s the difference between a good life and an exceptional one,” while their spouse says “I’m guilty of nothing,/except complacency.” The reader is left pondering dehydration and longing for sustenance.

The voice of the speaker in Micheline Maylor’s latest book of poems is clear, true, and honest. So much feels illusionary in the world these days, and honesty is fleeting. When you see a spoken truth or honesty so skilfully embodied in poetry—in poems that are naked in their revelations about how the mechanics of a marriage rust and decay—it feels refreshing and vibrant. The poet’s quick wit, too, adds another bevel to the prism that forms The Bad Wife. This is a collection that draws the reader in, perhaps because of its confessional tone. This isn’t a series of poems that makes excuses for infidelity, but instead is a gathering of poems that freely speaks to how things fall apart if one person in a marriage does not feel valued, and if communication is hampered. It is, to be sure, a book that you won’t be able to put down.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com