Kate Rogers : The thing with feathers, by Jessica Outram

The thing with feathers, Jessica Outram
Piquant Press, 2022

 

 

 

The Thing with Feathers is Cobourg Poet Laureate Jessica Outram’s first poetry collection. It is a courageous journey of self-exploration and coming to terms with trauma. The title, based on Emily Dickinson’s well-known lines about hope perching in the soul, opens the door to eventual healing. However, many of the poems in the first two sections are about the struggle with depression linked to a struggle to recognise supressed trauma. Her collection raises the question How does anyone learn to live with a traumatic past? The process of doing that is the core of the book.

We are introduced to the speaker’s reflective journey into and out of despair in the poem “Beginning.” She tells us that “old scaffolding / leans courage ladders / on new truth platforms.” In this poem “house plants / turn wild,” suggesting the speaker’s surprise at her own growth. In “If She Had a Secret Garden,” the speaker’s “tangled prayers climb stone walls.”

The poem “Falling into Blankness” evokes the speaker’s depression and exhaustion well. As an educator who is also a writer I can relate to how hard it can be to reach for creativity after a full day of teaching and being on your feet: “in the evening she paints misty truths / while hands and feet sizzle.”

The lines in which the speaker describes how she “craves an overcast sky / to quiet the mornings // …blends mud and clouds” and being “soaked in fog / like a lighthouse on a humid island” are also very relatable and beautifully evoke Cobourg harbour.

In her role as Cobourg Poet Laureate Jessica Outram maintains a blog she calls “Sunshine in a Jar.” Jars feature in many of her poems in The Thing with Feathers. The jar poems in the book range from nostalgia to despair. The poem “Something Inside Her Childhood” focuses on positive memories, beginning with the her mom’s inviting “strawberry jam [on] the kitchen counter.” 

Among the collection’s most courageously vulnerable poems is “Open the Jar” in which the speaker removes the lid on her memory. It whispers to her that “a piece of the story is missing.”

Jessica Outram is also Principal of Indigenous Education for the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board and an important role model. Her students’ struggles contribute to her understanding of her own adolescence in the poem “Open the Jar.”

The speaker effectively evokes how the intensity of her students in turmoil becomes a trigger for her: “A morning swarming at 7:45. / Two hundred teenagers / chase a Grade 10 girl.” 

Soon pepper spray engulfs classrooms, staircases, washrooms. It is a “toxic shot.” A 15-year-old boy is in handcuffs. A student dies. The speaker passes another student her graded work and learns that the girl’s boyfriend is the one in jail, charged with attempted murder. Reflecting on the school day the speaker realizes “Once upon a time / my jar was empty, / the lid twisted tight.”

In the next poem, “She Remembers and Wants to Forget,” the speaker’s journaling reveals to her the “howling hands / memories spilling like blood.”

The speaker of the powerful poem “In a Jar” starts each line with “when” and doesn’t flinch: “she was there / when she wrote poems about death / when her novel started with rape.” The poem reveals the speaker’s suffering and inner struggle: “when her heart beat hot fear” and “when your insults felt like truth.”

In “What Would Great-Auntie Think?” The speaker uncovers more pain: “remembers at nine— / You’re too fat for chocolates, / Auntie said snapping the lid…” // —this mirror haunting her for years.”

In the self-aware poem “The Siren Call of Depression” the speaker sinks “caught between / breath and panic / without gills.” She bravely shares that “…it seems safer to hold… than to claim / some air / as her own.”

Other strong poems include those about the poet’s Georgian Bay Ojibway and Metis ancestors. In the beautiful and moving “And Still She Shines: Take Back the Night” the speaker grieves, “her fists / wrapped around keys /…“sometimes losing to fear.” She remembers and honours the “women in red dresses gone too / beyond medicine wheels.”

In “When She Found Her Voice” the speaker explores how connecting with her heritage through holding a “Smudge Feather” “made her cry.” In the next poem “This Feather Sets Everything in Motion” the speaker learns to “build wings / fly North like her grandmothers // hearing their heartbeats among stars.” In the wistful  poem “If She Had Met Her Noohkoom” the speaker’s grandmother gifts her her moccasins and and her wisdom: “Noohkoom says, wait / then…look at the whole tree at once / all the branches together, connected.”

The persona poems in the voice of a match girl ancestor are also among the most deeply felt and well-crafted in the book.

Following in the wake of such brave and well-crafted poems some pieces fell short. Several poems would have had more impact if they had strived for fresher, more original language. Cliché’s and hackneyed metaphors in the poems “She Wants to Feel Special on Ordinary Days,” “When She Thinks About Self-Love”, “Thirteen Lessons That Need Unlearning” and “It’s Time to See What’s Really There” do not support the otherwise strong collection and could have been left out.

That being said, much original figurative language and many beautiful lines appear in The Thing With Feathers and have been quoted in this review. The bravery and emotional honesty of the collection are its greatest strength. I recommend The Thing With Feathers for the power of Jessica Outram’s personal journey and the courage it took to share it.

 

 

 

 

 

Kate Rogers’ poetry recently appeared in the “Neighbours” issue of SubTerrain and the following anthologies: Looking Back at Hong Kong (CUHK Press), The Beauty of Being Elsewhere and Dove Tails: Letters from the Self to the World, the 10^th Anniversary Writing for Peace Anthology. Her essay “The Accident,” appeared in the Spring 2021 Windsor Review.

Kate’s reviews have recently appeared in Ricepaper journal, Arc Poetry Magazine and Prism International.

Kate re-patriated to Canada in late 2019 after teaching tertiary level language through literature and related courses in Hong Kong for two decades. Her work can be viewed at: https://katerogers.ca/

Amanda Earl : Am I Too Blue For You

 

 

 

 

after Lucinda Williams

for Steven

I need to be a better poet if the good poets are dying too soon. I only have so much time left. None of the above is acceptable. The language isn’t specific, it’s dull. My subject is banal. I haven’t made this into a poem just a box to stow away my feelings. A ham-fisted elegy to a friend who I’d rather be e-mailing. He’s become another ghost in my inbox.

I’d like the scotch neat please. a toast to a kin(dred), even though alcohol is forbidden to me now. I will have to drink his heady words instead, returning to the dog-eared pages of his books and the inscriptions he wrote to me and dated, so I remember each time I saw him, each conversation in the Royal Oak, at the National Library, in hospitality suites in Ottawa and Kingston, on a train heading west.

I was thinking of my friend off and on this spring as the snow melted and the sidewalks cleared. I told him about the scooters when they first appeared in Ottawa. He seemed delighted. The day after he died I imagined him roaring along on a scooter up Sparks to Darcy McGee’s in one of those bright blue shirts he always wore for readings. The sky today is Steven Heighton reading shirt blue.

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a big fan of Steven Heighton's. She also writes and publishes folks. More info at AmandaEarl.com.

Rob Winger : Late Arrival

 

 

 

 

 

Steve, I’ve been reading your collected Selected,
earmarking its final pages for a next exchange
– a party hat, sure, but also the next tower
on the bridge, without cables just yet,
holding space across this water between us. 

Why do you wait till the waiting fills years
you ask, here, on this page written the year
we might first have met. Why will you stall till
the stalling’s your life? Online, all my feeds
are hungry with love notes, mixed tapes, 

festival lineup chit-chat, craggy outcrops and
dog-filled mountain meadows, serious hula hoops
and basement hecklers, a kid’s constellations,
your bottle still sitting on the staircase down. It’s only
now I see the all the gravestones between your covers. 

I’d like to ask your thoughts on all these bridges,
Steve. But only the central girders, the primary
roadways with their cable-stayed towers, only
the ends of the cantilever levelling, only these
have yet been built across this water. 

In your second-to-last email, you said, it seemed
to you, we were uncannily similar men, so Chapeau
bas, you typed. If only. The new Champlain bridge,
I see, was built in independent sections, too, only later
linked with a clear roadway that looked like earth. 

It’s fix yourself now or always be broken you said.
So you’re still holding, I think, that whiskey glass
or some Martin’s slender neck. You’re still offering
your winter coat to some freezing stranger. You’re
listening to another final speaker’s ancient closing tongue. 

The bridge, then: not just a poem, but a poem written
with care across water. Not just a pointing towards the far
shore, but a way across this rushing gorge, less snow
globe than astral plane. Let’s catch that new thermal the next
time you’re standing here, okay? We’ll ride it all the way across.

 

for Steven Heighton (1961-2022), with three lines from his “Gravesong,”

 

 

 

 

Rob Winger is the author of four books of poetry, including his latest, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant. He lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches at Trent University.

Natalee Caple : Hello, you've reached 1994. I'm unable to reach you unable to remember what I was trying to say. Please leave a message for me please don’t say, goodbye for now.

 

 

 

I thought I thought a waste a curtain in front of something I wanted to write 

I was going to phone and say no one owns the water friend to my way of thinking you would answer me beautiful astronaut sure sure we look older but answering doesn’t cost a dime don’t laugh but I remember you saying when I was sad as we kissed goodbye what a lovely kiss and I said tell everyone Gosh I think I’m drunk again! I want to be drunk again all of us in a living room a room where we are all alive

Hello those you awhile bereaved Hello daughters and lovers Hello wife and friends Hello

Black curls black irises insomnia guitars sunflowers chili

What if I keep saying bastard, is that a spell? Please don't cut me off by dying leave a voice in the void to stall goodbye 

Fuck nature & nature poems find signals on impossible winds keep from disconnecting right now cause it’s not time for you I'm screening memories in a factory and waiting up for an explanation 

 

                                                                 for Steven Heighton (1961-2022)

 

Natalee Caple is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction. Her latest book of poetry, Love in the Chthulucene/Cthulhucene was published by Wolsak and Wynn in Spring 2019. Natalee is an associate professor at Brock University.