Her Red Hair Rises With The Wings of Insects - Catherine Graham (Wolsak & Wynn)

 Today's book of poetry:
Her Red Hair Rises With The Wings Of Insects.  Catherine Graham.  Wolsak & Wynn Publishers.  Hamilton, Ontario.  2013.

This collection, Her Red Hair Rises With The Wings Of Insects, which is a stunningly good title, starts with an introduction by the author, Catherine Graham:

     "Most of the poems in this book began as glosas, an early
     Renaissance form developed during the fourteenth century
     by poets in the Spanish court.  The opening four lines of
     another poet's work (the cabeza) are woven into the last
     line of each of four ten-line stanzas."

Well, I don't how else to say it.  I hate this sort of thing.  I always figure if you are explaining the poems before they even start, well, I had visions in my head...

Then I started in on the poems themselves and proved myself wrong again..

To The Animal He Met In The Dark

I've often thought about you.

How you came in the night, in the middle of the night,
to stand on the road for some goddamn reason.

How in the blinding light you stood as still as branches,
like anything trapped.

Nothing to see in the darkened windshield–
just the last expression on my drunk father's face,

and you, white-tailed beast, reflected, just like that,
on your way through your own nocturnal route.

I have so often thought about you.

...

These poems resonate with absolute clarity, purpose and poise.  Graham is as exact as NASA, and as elegant as P.K. Page.  More about that in a minute.

Tchotchkes

He says he'll write. Sometimes he does with letters so spare
and spiny like cacti they sting the absence.

I wait like a child for more tchotchkes from other countries
where air floats cobalt blue or hot vermilion.

If I could trap his taste on my tongue, I'd keep it boxed
like a doll from Bogata.

All I have are hands with river etches that map his exotic locales,
and this rock where I outline a fossil of fish to carve his story.

Only my hand under water, the swan-tilt
of my wrist, a bangle from Arabia–

He's always leaving me and telling me he's coming back.
"Soon," he says, pointing to the moon.

But when it's full or empty?
He doesn't answer. He says he'll write.


after "Queen's Ransom" Gethsemane Day
...

These glosas are meant to pay tribute to P.K. Page and the Irish poet Dorothy Molloy.  While I'm reasonably familiar with Page, I don't know Molloy's work at all.  Fortunately that doesn't really matter as Graham has seamlessly packaged all this.  She has the technical mastery to make the glosas disappear - what I mean is that the technique vanishes and we are left with strong, vibrant poems that aren't bridled by technique.

There is humour, wit, sensual experience, fantasy and grace in these poems.  Hard to ask for more than that.  It is also a delight to read, to recommend.

And I'm certain P.K. Page and Dorothy Molloy would both be chuffed.

There Is A Stir, Always

If I hold onto this body the snow will grow inside me
and the winter of my cells will flake
into tiny crystals like six-figured gods,
each arrow tip attempting to make the point of something
as tears flow.

There is a stir, always.

I rise to the cold
to take my place among the fragile stars,
and sleep.

...

Catherine Graham is the author of four previous collections of poetry.




FROM THE BACK COVER:

"Graham dives sensually into experience and enables the reader to follow.  She writes what happens so that it happens again."
     -Poetry Ireland Review

"One of Toronto's brightest poetry minds."
     -Open Book: Toronto

"Graham utilizes images from fantasy and nature, working these poems to mine a quarry of loss...And Graham writes that loss into startling poems."
     -The Telegraph-Journal

"More goose bumps per page than any collection in recent memory."
     -Broken Pencil

"Graham tells such incredibly layered stories with so few words that I'm constantly blinking in amazement."
     -The New Quarterly

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Poet to Poet - A few minutes with Catherine Graham

A Nervous City - Chris Pannell (Wolsak & Wynn)

Today's book of poetry:
A Nervous City.  Chris Pannell.  Wolsak and Wynn.  Hamilton, Ontario.  2013.

It was after I had read several poems.  It was a certain feeling, a particular sense of the familiar.  But I could not put my finger on it.  Then it occurred to me, Chris Pannell and I are the same age, we were both born in 1956.  And now it all makes sense, Chris Pannell is a GOM, just like me.  A grumpy old man tired of almost everyone and everything but still in love with it all.

The Snowmen of Suburbia

with their blowers
roaring in the winter sun
make clear
what has been obscured of the old asphalt world

meanwhile new talking heads
expand like balloons
and burst upon the topic of the new world
post-concrete, the new austerity, the new wealth,
the new style of getting things done
of dropping things off
for someone else
to do

haziness must surely be the fifth element
the eleventh commandment
the last mangy dog catcher of the apocalypse

the end of all old things
announced through the cold megaphone
of the way things
used to be

...

A Nervous City is built on a strong narrative drive, these poems are stories that we have all been through, things we have all seen or heard - but filtered through Pannell's voice we get to observe small moments of beauty in the rush of things, little victories that make the everyday tolerable.

The Three Fates

at ten minutes past moonlight
on Jackson East:  one squats and holds
a dingy white mutt                                on a long leash.

A second cocks her head over a cellphone
and paces, her skirt fluttering in the light on the corner.

The third:  on a city bench
rubs a vein in her arm, a discarded syringe glints -

She stares into the middle
distance, waiting for the bliss
to kick in.

...

And the defeats that haunt us all.

Pannell's world is populated with real people, being human.

I always love a good hockey poem and Pannell's twist on a chance meeting between his mother and the legendary Toronto hockey God Darryl Sittler is a good example:

When My Mother Met Darryl Sittler at the Supermarket

Hockey not being her hip check
or forte, and only because my sister was, at the time
extravagantly smitten with the sporting god of the day
my mother stayed calm when she saw Darryl Sittler
at the local IGA two weeks before the playoffs were to begin.

Cool as a goal judge
and a pound of butter in wax paper the only thing at hand -
she stickhandled her way up the aisle
around the tower of toilet paper on sale
the abandoned carts in a scrum
(Mom was a strong skater
a bit of elbow, some interference there -
she could always see a play before it developed.)

At last, in a shower of ice chips
she confronted the Leafs' captain
and handed him, as if he was the ref
the brick of butter, as cold as a puck.

Could you hold this for a sec?
while she rooted around in her purse for a pen.
Could you sign this for me please?
as if the heroic Sittler had become
the Dairy Department Manager
who could validate her parking
It's for my daughter actually.

              and that's where the story ended -
the butter was eaten
the wrapper kept, the Leafs lost in the playoffs -
except that in June, as my sister cleaned out her school locker
I heard her bragging to one of her linemates
about how she'd met Darryl at our house
the night we had all been
on a first-name basis.

...

A kind and gentle, even loving poem, with a sharp human twist at the end.  The exaggeration of the sister so purely played out you can hear the high school locker clang shut, the chatter of voices in a school hall between classes.

Chris Pannell is doing nothing new here, there is little in the way of experimentation, and for some that is cause for less serious attention.  I would argue the opposite.  Because these are strong narrative poems and easily accessible, immediately understood, I would contend this is poetry of the highest order.

I love it when the reader can fully engage in the text without fear of being ridiculed.  These poems are strong and unapologetic.  Mr. Pannell, who has published five previous books of poetry, gets my thanks and the final word:

A New Poem

is pristine, like a spring flower has colour
and life, not just potential

you all said you enjoyed what we did
call it a life, full of disputing
but agreeable
we stayed all night, past the dawn

drinking up words like beer and writing with our fingers
on any flat surface, crazy with vision

we wants novels
about the man in the armour
not his herald and standard-bearer, who are details merely
but ah, the innards
break open a poem, eat the nut like a bird

this is the writing life, as Annie Dillard said
take it or leave
the new poem behind for the sweeper
it's still yours.

...



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Arguments With The Lake - Tanis Rideout (Wolsak & Wynn)

Today's book of poetry:
Arguments With The Lake.  Tanis Rideout.  Wolsak & Wynn.  Hamilton, Ontario.  2013.

Tanis Rideout's Arguments With The Lake is a fictional account of the lives of Marilyn Bell and Shirley Campbell, two long distance swimmers who tried to swim Lake Ontario in the 1950's.  Campbell was unsuccessful and Bell became a legendary figure.

Arguments With The Lake imagines their relationships, the relationship we all have water and the tides that push us together, pull us apart.

Begin

This lake, like others, was dug out.  Glacial ice grinding south, scouring
weak Silurian stone, an arctic tsunami leaving only the backbone
of the escarpment.  Canadian Shield and broken tumble of kames in its
     retreat.

The glacial rebound cast this lake of shimmering waters, Ontario, Give
     or take
a geologic blink.  And now, a girl on Holocene shores measures the
     distance -
her to here.  Fifty-four kilometres as the crow flies, the herring gull,
the cormorant with dried wings.  Sixty-four against the current.
Three point two kilometers an hour, slower than a winter housefly
bumbling against your window.  This might be finished tomorrow.

She inhales, wishes for the bones of a bird, a pigeon's honing for home.
Small arms become wings, beating against the jagged lake.
She'll make the decision over and over and over.
Nothing is a miracle or happens only once.

...

As much as these poems, as a collection, tell Marilyn Bells' story – emotionally, these poems are telling universal stories, ones that we can all identify with.

I have to believe Rideout is some sort of swimmer herself, has a great deal of experience being in the water, at least that's what her poems tell me.  I know two serious swimmers who are also writers.  Richard Taylor, whom I had the pleasure of studying under at Carleton University, has written at length about swimming and his relationship to the water, the contemplative universe it creates.  Another friend, Toronto poet Ward Maxwell, also swims for distance.  Rideout has captured the feel of that world and shares it until your fingers begin to prune a bit.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Inside there's terror.  Just her and the lake,
dark as the space under her bed.  The embryo curl of her feet to her
chest.  Arms churn, pray they won't tire.  Six hours to daylight.

Eggbeat.  Breathe.  There's the hand reaching from the deep
when her foot slips from mattress in nightmare throes.
Wails.  There's no making it better.  No mother's palm
on forehead.  Calming cool.  One foot disappears
beneath.  Breathe.  Breathe.  Then the other.  And she's lost
from the ribs down, as though amputated, erased in ink.

The enormous noise of the lake when you're in it – breathe –
every dead and living thing it holds waiting.  The black of it a
     tremendous
hum.  First one stroke, then the next cuts, throws out white
froth, delineating her from the dark.  Breathe.

...

Tanis Rideout doesn't make this movie into a Hollywood fairy tale – it's more of a tug of war against the pull of tides and reason.  Rideout's crisp voice resonates throughout this saga whether from behind the winsome eyes of Bell or those of the tragic Campbell.

Logged

On the shore:  an ambulance, a reporter disguised
as a nurse betrayed by lipstick, typewriter-chipped nails,
insensible shoes.  Holding pruned hands, she pokes, prods –
each instrument's a question.  You're being distilled.

How long before the water gets into every part of you?
Fingers and toes swollen in evolutionary memory, to hold your place –
wet through and through, even that spot below
the tongue, across the gums that holds a hangover.

All the symptoms of water on the brain – excessive
sleepiness, slow movement, vomiting.  The whorls
of fingerprints recede, and you're left
the same as you were before.

For days you puke and piss the lake, its currents
eddying in shrinking veins and the marshlands
of your lungs.  With each move, each dreaming toss
and turn, the lake still sloshes against your skin.

...

Rideout gives us a history lesson, a swimming lesson, and a treatise on the nature of the long distance swimmer – but she is really talking about the navigation we must all endure, pulled as we are towards the rocks of shore.

Shirley Tallies Some Failures

Moorless nights strung out along the shores
of Belleville, Napanee, Kingston.  Lake becomes a river.
Then Kingston, Brockville, Morrisburg where the last
of those brick loyalist homes are claimed as B & Bs
for two-car couples arriving by the highway.

In the seaway, the rest dwindle, subside and sweep
out to sea.  Along with everything lost:  a husband, children
and years of false sobriety.  Detritus resurfaces wanting
remembrance:  chipped, faded, broken down.

Messages come, not by bottle – they're all shattered –
but by pigeons that perch and coo on every windowsill, by gulls
that shriek and warn with red dots on their beaks.  I am their home.
I make for the next port, and they'll find me there, too,
as drowned as those swamped farmhouses
below lumbering cargo ships on the Saint Lawrence.

...

Tanis Rideout's Arguments With The Lake is accomplished stuff, compelling, well crafted and clever.

These comments appear on the back cover of Tanis Rideout's  Arguments With The Lake, I think all three of them eloquently say what I was attempting while thrashing about in deep water.


"Cold-eyed and driven, these poems carve away the fatty sentiments around the Great Lake swimmers, those glamour girls of myth.  With these constantly surprising and multifarious narratives starring Marilyn Bell and Shirley Campbell, two girls swallowing the 'frigid knife of water," Tanis Rideout proves herself capable of just about anything."

     Carolyn Smart, author of Hooked


"Poems that swim elegantly, that slide streamlined with every other flowing thing - as if they themselves were another layer of fluid."

     Gord Downie, author of Coke Machine Glow


"Arguments with the Lake is a coming-of-age poetic odyssey told in mythic and sensuous language.  In these verses the poet engages the element of water to discover the many meanings of (her) life.  MacEwanesque in scope, Arguments with the Lake invokes in the reader a sense of timelessness and breathless wonder."

     Jury's citation, CBC Literary Award

Everyone Is Co2 - David James Brock (A Buckrider Book/Wolsak & Wynn)

Today's book of poetry:
Everyone Is CO2.  David James Brock.  A Buckrider Book.  Wolsak & Wynn Publishers.  Hamilton, Ontario.  2014.

Asshhole, Werewolf, Hangover

From the bed, the spin. The blinds are open.
The sun is a jerk. Last night a werewolf bit me.
I imagine cravings: the squirrels and mice,
the backyard bunny, the raccoon-bastard-dirty-
fighters. Their smell will scatter, then blind me,

and I will start weak, made rubber by the
mephitic. The smell of cut onion waft and no
kitchen fan. That stench of rotten egg scratching
the retina. That stench extending like a handful
of ninja metsubushi, so death to all raccoons.

Out of the shadows, the depressions, I search
for new spirit. I lose ambition. In a sepia photo,
I see fat Russian men wrestling vodka-fed bears.
I fight a bear. Then I chase a deer, like Nicholson
in Wolf, a how-to for my loneliness. Because

I cannot bear to watch An American Werewolf in London,
an uncanny valley reminds me of scenes too possible.
Last night, something clamped pharynx to larynx.
I spoke when I should have breathed. I pulled beating
hearts from their cavities. My big mouth gave fangs

their wiggle room. I spit all the secrets, and now
bar benches will be empty in my circumference.
A guilt-ridden platter of shots. Sorry. There is no
rebuilding after a devouring. The original substance
cannot refreeze, i.e., no take backs. You said what you

said when you said it, asshole. Identify my body
by the teeth. Remember me, friends, whispering
and mild. This morning, my future lies before me.
No excuses. Okay, a werewolf bit me, but forgive
the violence I've achieved. It attacked in self-defense.

...

"Asshole, Werewolf, Hangover" pretty much outlines and describes the modus operandi of David James Brock.  These poems leap from the page directly at your jugular.  That is, of course, only after he has sucker-punched your brain.  This is a master stage director plotting the audience and organizing their gasps.

Dude & Dude's Dog

Dude watched old Westerns and wondered when the horses died.
Dude's dog wears a sweater.

Dude believed in a fish species isolated and evolving with the wreck of the Titanic.
Dude's dog was born near a Philadelphia racetrack.

Dude thought ladies in mink coats looked like grizzly bear wannabees.
Dude's dog laps buttermilk from a plastic dish.

Dude thought dogs wearing sweaters was proof they were the ones in charge.
Dude's dog has paws that make music on the kitchen floor linoleum.

Dude mourned in ceremony for each death of a department store goldfish.
Dude's dog spent an entire nap with a butterfly on his back.

Dude could identify birds from the chirps out his window.
Dude's dog is afraid of television gunshots.

Dude watched old Westerns and wondered when the horse actors died.
Dude's dog misses Dude.

Dude's dog wears a sweater.

...

Brock shreds common sense as unnecessary as he rollicks all over the place with Shaman-like wisdom and an encyclopedic memory.

Jerry Reed and Elvis reunite and dirge around a Confederate flag, Greek gods puff their cheeks and the Doobie Brothers go head to head with the Lemonheads.  Brock has much going on without a scorecard, he is juggling more than one knife in the air, but with dexterity and much humour.

Tablet 1: Tyrant

They think I am more god than man,
I cannot change the minds of fools.

Brides believe I can steal them new,
a beaten groom accepts my grip

on his virgin. Warriors, battle strong,
have my hips and hands upon them.

Lives are imagined long. Time and time again,
weak souls implore lenient sunrise.

Let morning show mercy,
dusk is not a well-made shelter,

I am above plebeian rhythm, circadian pity,
this love is nightmare born:

men crave a god among them.
Restrain me, create my equal,

or cry and bow, kneel and bend -
conjure some solace

while the men among us laugh.

...

Tablet 11: Mortality

1.
I could not conquer time and age.

2.
If eyes never close, how can heart's rage cease?
I could not conquer sleep.

3.
I could not swim deep
nor hold the magic at ocean's bottom,
nor protect the secret from the shedding snake.

4.
The snake believes it can never die,
it forever feels so new.

5.
I cannot live forever. I fight that savage,
grow to love that friend.

6.
So love me now, friend.
We will see each other soon
or never again.

...

I thought Everyone is CO2 was whipsmart stuff from start to end.  Reading Brock is bit like a carnival you never expected to attend but enjoy thoroughly.  Good poetry should make you go places you've yet to travel, it should make you squirm once in a while.  Brock's intelligent dander has a take-no-prisoner appeal.

David James Brock

Photo credit: Amanda Lynne Ballard

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David James Brock is a playwright, poet and librettist whose plays and operas have been performed in cities across Canada and the UK. His writing has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including Event, The Hart House Review, The Malahat Review, Poetry is Dead and The Puritan. He was the winner of the 2011 Herman Voaden Canadian National Playwriting Award, and he is also co-creator of Breath Cycle, an opera developed for singers with cystic fibrosis (www.breathcycle.com). He lives in Toronto and can be found on Twitter @davidjamesbrock.

BLURBS

"'The wind reveals itself by the dirt it moves,' In a collection that shifts seamlessly from Adam Yauch to Gilgamesh, from present-day Steubenville to the year 2039, David James Brock comes at us slant with an often-heartbreaking view of the world. With his chisel and blowtorch, Brock reveals to us what we always knew was the bedrock of our lives, but could never look, or stand on, for long."

     Dani Couture, author of Yaw and Algmoa

"Not long into David James Brock's snappy debut, the formication sets in. 'We are each exhibits in the human zoo,' he writes, and many of these poems zoom in gleefully on the wriggle and squelch of the corporeal. There's something of Jekyll in his poem-making, alchemic and unpredictable. And that gleam in his eye? Unmistakably Hyde. It's when Brock turns his attention to old friends and good tunes that you see how soulful he is.  Everyone is CO2 is a hair raiser."

     Matthew Tierney, winner of the Trillium Poetry Prize for Probably Inevitable

David James Brock reads "Adam Yauch (Eightfold)"

from Everyone is CO2

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Love Will Burst Into A Thousand Shapes - Jane Eaton Hamilton (Caitlin Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Love Will Burst Into A Thousand Shapes.  Jane Eaton Hamilton.  Caitlin Press.  Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.  2014.

It is not, I promise you, that I think I'm smarter than most - I don't.  But I do think I'm smarter than some.  Jane Eaton Hamilton is not one of them.  I love smart poetry and Love Will Burst Into A Thousand Shapes is as smart as it gets.

Usually I'm a little offended and a little annoyed when I have to open my very much used dictionary because a poet has a better vocabulary than mine.  I know it is childish.  I'm almost always a little peeved when they show superior wit.  Jealous on both counts might be more accurate.

So why did I LOVE Hamilton's Love Will Burst Into A Thousand Shapes?  I loved the title when I first saw the book and then when I started reading these poems they hit like a beautiful velvet hammer.

Love Will Burst Into A Thousand Shapes 1:  Frida Kahlo

The first time I married Diego
he could not lift the paintbrush
from my womb
I bled cadmium from interior spaces
yawning with pubic hair, seeds
cactus roots
cavernous with absence
feeding myself with the milk of Solanaceae
Demeter's teats
spitting out sugary skeletons
instead of babies
slipping toward parthenogenesis

After I married Diego a second time
he wound necklaces of thorns around my throat
I bled alizarin crimson from soft flesh
feeding myself dead birds
Other women crowded around
masticating and cheering, but they were nothing
even my sister was nothing
(was I? Was I nothing? With my lovers?)

Diego grabbed the sky
through the cavern in my chest
his arm a straight unbearable pole
and told me that was all the love
he had

Fair is fair; I didn't have a heart anymore
just something swollen
a girl's red castle of pain
wetly beating on sand

_____________
1  Frida Kahlo, not to Diego Rivera

...

Jane Eaton Hamilton's raw and crippling precise poetry is a bit like your first grasp of Picasso.  It doesn't happen with one painting (or one poem).  It is the result of accumulated brilliance.

Love Will Burst... has poems using paintings and painters as a starting point, poems about being a girl, being a woman, being alive.  The subjects of these poems don't matter nearly as much as the mastery.  Hamilton is the perfect dance partner, she only lets you think you are leading.

Mikltini

I) The Broom

is a pole with attached bristles
The broom can stand in a closet and be seen by no one
The broom comes alive only in hands:

a woman's hands
ordinary, tremoring
sweeping mouse nests and spiderwebs across the kitchen tile
toward the living-room carpet
under the underlay they lump like live things

The problem of cash
The problem of the vomiting child
The problem of varicose veins
The problem of the car's bald tires
The problem of the husband's fist

At the intersection of 14th and Quebec
a broom --turquoise, plastic, short black bristles
has been struck, its pole twisted and warped,
the head dethroned

II) The Sponge

is not what the woman calls for when
her head splits, but it is all the boy thinks
to grab from the silver belly of the sink
and what he holds to her blood-clotted hair

It is the same sponge swiped the night before
across pork gravy

III) The Bucket

is worn by the boy when he wants to
shut out fighting
Is yellow. Has a
compartment to wring out the mop
When the boy wears the bucket he believes
he is invisible, an action hero
who can zip through the battle zone
as invisible as his mother
who is known to be clumsy
who calls in sick on average four days every month

IV) The Vacuum

was originally her mother's vacuum
Is so old it has a fabric electrical cord
a two-pronged plug

The bags fill up like paper pregnancies
to be discarded
She would like a wet-dry vac

The vacuum makes an unholy roar. Sounds like aircraft

V) The Mop

also combats dirt
the kind that adheres
the way a bruise adheres
When dinner is flung from the table
a broom will take care of the mess
(Caesar salad, green beans, rice, salmon)
but anything wet
blood in particular
leaves a sticky film

The mop is a fright wig
a Medusa head

VI) The Toilet Bowl Cleanser

Pine-Sol. The boy adds it to water
where it turns to milk
While his mother serves ice cream
he passes it to his father
Milktini, Dad! Drink your milktini!

...

Make no mistake, Hamilton is a clever assassin.  She can cut your heart out while you are still reading, falling to the floor.  There is little in the way of tender mercy here.  Hamilton is a Ninja poet. Hamilton is a nurse to the ill-considered, the ill-informed reader, a dark and sometimes harrowing beacon of incandescent light.

Jane Eaton Hamilton's Love Will Burst Into A Thousand Shapes is astonishingly good, painfully honest.

Did I mention brave?  She's that too.  Her love poems are lovely, the sex poems sexy, all the stuff in-between tailored to excellence.

Regardless of your choice of plumbing the poem "Sleepless" is a tour d'force.

Sleepless

We did not sleep and were made insane by it, and loved the stupidity
Gads, it was just the thing, all that rutting, our senses electrified
honeyed bee stings, slow-sinking mudslicks--sex
meted out in silken slaps on a slow summer landscape of skin
most extraordinary, more to us than Lamborghinis
or Ecosse cycles, more than soaring through cerulean skies, skin was
licked, bitten, scorched, twisted, puckered, rubbed raw, hickeyed
blown on, finger-tipped, heated, cooled, exalted--

every time we fucked it was brand new, brand new, I say
like a cotyledon leaf through spring soil, like starlight brimming night

in mewls and murmurs and mine a hosanna, a liturgical worship--
did we hear a choir of lesbians? cries and exclamations and groans
and caught breath and occasional exhortations as leg cramps or
ovaries knocked or a nipple tweaked past good pain--

let me talk about her frankness, the way she opened me as an orange
stripping off bumpy rind, the way she peeled me so I came apart
in sections juicy and dripping through her hands
my head thrown back
my throat rippling, how she asked me to show her
fucking myself ... I stopped time
for that, wouldn't you? Fuck, wouldn't you?
masturbating naked on her deck in the sunshine
my skin hot and prickling ... if you could, wouldn't you
stop everything and just--

and the first thing, no, it wasn't the first thing
but neither of us was keeping notes ... the actual first thing
was the moon fingering shadows through arbutus leaves
while she lifted her Folk Fest t-shirt
and I moved like silk behind her, my breasts globular and firm
and ran my tongue up the bones of her spine, bump, valley
bump, valley and so on, before a kiss, I mean, I seriously mean that--
before a kiss, or even, the next night in another town
weeping against her, sobbing for the cruelties of illness--her fist
struggled to fit inside me, slow lubed penetration, agonizingly sweet
and harsh, my cunt became a balloon, a hollow, filling
with this woman's richest tactility, and began to--

she began interphalangeal articulations, I mean she began to move
against me, my red leaking bruised flesh
a postural rotation, I mean her wrist turned
and I reached to feel her there
fisting me, and I could see her move inside me by watching above
my pelvic bone, the shape of her fingers almost visible
and I was gobsmacked that a woman
was taking me like that, punching me, if you will, if you go where
bdsm goes (which we didn't--we did not, that, quite)
I arched my back, began to undulate
and roll my eyes back as she flung me
over Saturn like an extra moon, like Titan.. I was all head and no head
at the same time, blown like a gunshot, blown into space--

...

"Sleepless" goes on for several more verses, each as good as the last, better than almost any other.  Wow.

Hamilton whispers and roars with a fierce clarity and a heart stopping tenderness.  What a joy to read and share.

Jane Eaton Hamilton

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry. Her book July Nights was shortlisted for a BC Book Prize and her book Hunger was shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award. Body Rain, her first book of poetry, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, and her chapbook, Going Santa Fe, won the League of Canadian Poets Poetry Chapbook Award. A pseudonymous memoir was on the Guardian’s Best of the Year list and was a Sunday Timesbestseller. She has been included in the Journey Prize anthology and Best Canadian Short Stories, and has been cited in Best American Short Stories. She has won many prizes for her short fiction, including, twice, the Prism International short fiction contest, and first prize in the CBC Literary Awards. She has been published in the New York Times, Seventeen magazine, Salon,Numero Cinq, Macleans, the Globe and Mail, the Missouri Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review and many other places.

BLUBS

"love will burst into a thousand shapes is jazzy and engaging.  Hamilton proves herself to be a real wordsmith, with a trickster's soul and a heart as big as New Mexico.  The poems are enlightening, risky, funny as hell, and ultimately very moving."

     Barry Dempster, author of Invisible Dogs

"In her new collection of poetry -- ekphrastic, maternal, erotic -- Jane Eaton Hamilton writes with grace, vigour and brilliant colour."

     Ellis Avery, author of The Last Nude

"In writing 'every time we fucked it was brand new, brand new' Hamilton summons her reader to participate in this intimate newness.  These poems are too luscious, too seductively vexatious to read at arm's length."

     Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

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