This Will Be Good - Mallory Tater (Book*hug)

Today's book of poetry:
This Will Be Good.  Mallory Tater.  Book*hug.  Toronto, Ontario.  2018.

This Will Be Good by Mallory Tater could be a mystery, will our heroine survive the self-loathing of her childhood?  It could easily be a romance because Today's book of poetry dropped his jaw and a little of his heart when we started to see just how Tater navigated.

It is so hard for children to become the children of their parents dreams, or their own, hard for young people period.  It's a complicated world and of course you all know that.  This Will Be Good could be seen as Tater's coming to terms with herself, big deal...

                                                                                        but there's magic in these here poems.

The sheer number of young people, women and men and the rest, who keep journals and write poems, it is entirely overwhelming.  And for the most part justifiably not for public consumption for personal and qualitative reasons.  

But Mallory Tater has panache.  There are moments of pure electric joy in these sad poems.  These are poems of such tender honesty that you will want to reach out to the young people in your lives.

Tater goes bone deep.

All Things Wasted

Point Roberts, WA

Wind blows ocean into our yard

and Grandpa buttons his jacket,

says brennen zaun, let's burn the fence.

That barely remembered German

barnacles his throat. Storm will tear

the pickets down, wood half-rotten

and aren't we cold. Cabin pipes

good and frozen. Globe thistles,

gunmetal blue, die on my shoelaces.

Grandpa sucks a Lucky Strike, exhales

bats and bats. Spiked wings fall

from his lips, thread through

my loosened teeth, snag on my gums,

receded from griding in sleep.

Grandpa unearths our fence,

a simple pulling of teeth. We snap

each post against our knees,

chipped fangs tossed to the pit.

We are ready for the feel of fire.

The horses by the beach are starving.

Grandpa knows the man who aged

and tamed them, let livestock suck life

slowly from him. King tides have flooded

our street, have cured our fallen crabapples.

We feed them to flames, all fence and fruit,

and Grandpa looks so pleased, the scent

of all things wasting. A boy who once hid

in Steinheim fields, stole asparagus shoots

from farmers. The war was over, his mother

widowed, grief turned to endless

hunger. Sparks settle on the corners

of Grandpa's mouth. Fence turns to ash.

Next summer, we'll just build a new one.

Hearing aids off, all sound in his lap.

Neighbour's anxious flag, muted.

Grandpa says we have so much

and aren't we warm.

Later, he falls asleep and I watch

two horses drink hopelessly.

Their tongues push

under rocks for crab meat. Sand fleas

chew their spines as they spit

their wild minds on saw-tooth shells.

💫💫💫

Mallory Tater's fight against her eating disorder adds a particular slant to This Will Be Good.  It is a very intimate inside look, we taste what she does, understand her choices.  But Today's book of poetry is convinced that any subject Tater put her considerable talents to would result in the same intimate and clever tenacity.

What Today's book of poetry is so clumsily trying to express is that we think Tater has it.

"Finding your place in the world," as Book*hug suggests on the cover of This Will Be Good, is a universal struggle and Mallory Tater has turned her voyage into art.

Period

The winter my waist shed six inches,

my period stopped. My breasts depressed,

the skin around them slacked sackish

and loose. I became like burlap and this calmed

my hands. I no longer had a belly to pinch.

My throat withstood the aftermath

of meals. I sucked lemons after losing

to cool and clean cuts from biled food

clawing. All this to say that when it stopped,

I was glad. Tampons at the bottom of my bag

flattened but I kept them on hand

to hand to girlfriends in need before gym class.

I told my mother how sick I must be. She paid so much

attention to me we forgot my sisters, who held pencils

in their hands late into the night, who held hands

in church parking lots, laughing with communion

stuck to the roofs of their mouths. They did not take

the host from the priest, pretend

to swallow, slip it into their pockets. They wrote

nice letters to each other, slipped them under

bedroom doors, borrowed each other's blouses

and blouses forever. They loved Sunday night

strawberries and ice cream in front of the TV.

They did not feed the dog their breakfasts.

Mabel would learn to love French toast, get fat

and sick and her paws would shake from old age

but I would imagine it as all the sugar I gave her

and feel a wave of shameful indulgence. I would

no longer bleed and cramp and share in it. I would say

I hoped to be clean and thin forever like this

but in secret, I felt unabashedly dry,

excluded and light.

💫💫💫

Our morning read was taken over by our new intern, Maggie.  Maggie wears long-sleeved shirts all year long and she told me that she had some experience in the Taterworld of eating disorders and so on.  

The reading, as Maggie organized it, was sharp, crisp and crystal clear, the deeper we went in, the more everyone in the room leaned toward the centre.  Connected.  We were all in line, in tune, like we were singing backup to Laura Nyro, Patti Labelle Sarah Dash Nona Hendryx style.

Good work Tater.  Good work Maggie.

On the Train to Royal Columbian Hospital

We are told Grandpa will sleep his way

to death tonight. The infection in his pancreas

and lungs cannot be fixed with drainage

or prayer from the wandering chaplain.

We are told the father of our mother who built

cabin sheds and showers, drank mugs of ice milk

before bed, bought tickets to community magic

shows, will soon no longer breathe. The last

show he took me to before I became

a teen, a local widow who called herself

the Ta-Da Lady. Grandpa and I both raised our hands

and she asked us onto the stage. She held a sheet

to the crowd and we slipped through a trap door.

Beneath floorboards, Grandpa's heavy breathing

shielded me, thick as a coat. He said we were part

of the illusion, our bodies, thin air. His breath,

cherry cough drops and Dairy Queen cones.

We were beautifully gone together. Tonight I feel

the heat and weight and confusion of my sisters.

They conjure the same memory:

Grandpa swimming between sandbars

near our family cabin, bobbing up for breath

and flashing his teeth, sneering. He would become a shark

and would chase us. In our small blossomed

bathing suits, we used to run towards the shark,

never away, into his oceaned arms.

💫💫💫

A little bit of joy can go a long way.  It doesn't take much to make some people feel alive and worthy.  This Will Be Good stopped Today's book of poetry in our poetry tracks.  

Yesterday we were in Tamworth, Ontario, at the Book Shop, one of the best little book stores in the world, for a poetry reading.  Two men.  Both worth listening to.  But clearly male voices.  Mallory Tater poems come from a young woman's voice - but this old man needed to read these, these poems held this old man's poetry interest from the start to the end.

We will be talking about Mallory Tater's poetry again.  We are sure of it.

Mallory Tater

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mallory Tater is a writer from the traditional, unceded territories of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg Nation (Ottawa). Mallory’s poetry and fiction have been published in literary magazines across Canada such as Room Magazine, CV2, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, Carousel, Prism International and Arc Magazine. She was shortlisted for Arc Magazine’s 2015 Poem of The Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s 2016 Far Horizon’s Contest and Room Magazine‘s 2016 Fiction and Poetry Prizes. She was the recipient of CV2’s 2016 Young Buck Poetry Prize. She is the Publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a poetry chapbook press. She lives in Vancouver.

BLURBS
“This Will Be Good is a prayer, vicious and sweet. Tater’s dexterous language shreds the pink ribbons of nostalgia to remind that girlhood is both ‘sugared with fear’ and ‘diamond-hard.’” 

      —Adèle Barclay, author of If I Were In a Cage I’d Reach Out For You
“This Will Be Good details the truths of girlhood; how young women treat themselves with cruelty and tenderness, fend off and court desire, and brace themselves for a world that both expects too much of them and yet never enough. These poems unfold as stories girls tell each other as they make space to share, cope, grieve, and hopefully, heal.”

      —Dina Del Bucchia, author of Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items and Don’t Tell Me                                             What to Do
“Evocative and tactile as unearthed memory, This Will Be Good follows the history of a family through years, homes, seasons, and bodies. They’re death and grief, sex and religion. A reckoning with womanhood, manhood, and memory, these stories have a feeling of being passed down, kept secret, and slipped in notes and gestures between intimates whose closeness is felt on the skin. Press these words to your breast.” 

      —Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star and Sunshine State

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