From the instant that you pick up Deanna Fong's Butcher's Block (PistolPress, 2008) you'll be locked eye-to-eye (see cover, here) with a text that can stare back at you with an eerie stoic gaze -- not only from Bilyana Ilievska's haunting accompanying portraits, but from within Fong's poems as well. Each piece writhes with a subdued yet visible brand of intensity while she ties and fastens an intricate knot around the fundamental human instincts like hunger, sex, exploration and artistic expression -- instincts which so many, present company included, wrestle to hide in a losing battle every day of their lives.
Fong is one of several young poets on the roster of PistolPress, a shiny new imprint operated by the ambitious group of former Concordia students, Hillary Rexe, Gil Filar, JP King and Jessica Dolan. Butcher's Block is the second work from the press, released simultaneously with JP King's "We Will be Fish" in October 2008. The drive and enthusiasm of these individuals shines through in everything they have released to date, showing Canada that lesser-known poetry deserves a fresh platform to flourish even if the pressings are of a limited quantity.
At no point in Fong's text is the manacled relationship between hunger, sex, violence and artistic expression better articulated than in the poem "Montreal" when Fong plows aside a series of well-worn hyperbole and boldly constructs her own:
It's snowing icy sentence fragments and misused apostrophes'.
It's snowing flame-wrecked photographed roadside catastrophes.
It's snowing confectioner's sugar and salt petre,
into spires of sickening, flaccid meringue
This effective use of exaggeration is tactfully employed throughout the text as well. In "Evidence" as our subject slices, peels and pickles a jar of beets, Fong carefully crafts a stage upon which she can flex her poetic muscle to explore the shifting meanings within the seemingly mundane act. During the routine preparation of the vegetable, Fong binds vivid associative images into the poem that allow the action to maintain a tensely worded simmer: The beet "lies truncated on / the wooden cutting board" before each will "boil whole in batches" until the "fork [is] poked into their blanched bodies." Out of this torture is a literal rebirth when the subject "discard[s] their remains in the compost / under the cover of night" the following season brings forth a new dual existence for the beets -- as the compost for a garden of bursting red flowers, fruits and vegetables, and as the "bottled evidence; / the glassed-in gore."
This fragmentation of time and location is a technique that Fong uses in a deft and beautiful manner throughout the text in a variety of contexts, though most predominantly in the second section of the text entitled "The Exploration." This concluding stanza of "Oyster Bay" demonstrates the inextricable bonds that Fong is also tying between the subject, location, and place while weaving the vaguely gory images of blood and self-inflicted wounds:
Here the
stuff that sticks to the soles of feet
is not of the refined variety, but
grainy, jagged, inexperienced rock particles
that are awkward between toes,
rubbing the skin raw.
We gather these shards
of history,
hoard them in wet mounds,
and bury ourselves inside them, or
up to the ankle, at least.
There's a tenuous relationship with location in "The Exploration" comprised of seven poems, each documenting a precise Canadian locale. It begins with "Portrait of the Author's Youth, as Told Through a Brief History of Canadian Punk Houses" which ambles along from Edmonton to Campbell River, then Courtenay to Montreal. The remainder of section two is a journey as well, traipsing up and down the northeast coast of Vancouver Island and ending once again in Montreal. These seven concise poems send a road-weary reminder that despite the countless kilometers we may tread across this country or abroad, we will never likely shed our instinctual desires.
The third section of the text, "Hearts" marks a change in tone as the poems grow in length and emotional depth. It would seem that by this point, the poems shed their stoic gaze and begin to bring the characters to life. The standout poem of this section, and perhaps the entire text is the final piece, "To Bilyana" when the characters of the poem jump from the page as we're dropped hints about their love of "lambs and Django Reinhardt" and her "Slavic ancestry" but even more so when Fong transports the poem to a summertime scene through the lens of a video camera. The poem ends with a powerfully personal declaration about the relationship:
You are my airplane window from which
I view Saskatchewan's patchwork fields.
You are that copy of Small Change that I found on vinyl
at the Nifty Thrifty for a quarter.
You are the tiny notebook into which I scrawl the words
Dear Diary, What's new? Me, not much.
The illustrations of Bilyana Ilievska carefully placed throughout the text add a haunting element to the poems which frame them. No single image seems dedicated exclusively to a particular poem, because while they drop clear hints about which poem they may compliment, they provide just as many red herrings to lead us astray. Ilievska has cleverly given them a useful ambiguity that will surely stir up an array of emotions after countless readings. Each work of art is a gripping and inextricable element of the text that should not be glossed over by any reader.
What may likely impact readers of Butcher's Block the most, however, is the consistency with which the text's central images will appear and play a pivotal role in the overall feel of the text, despite shifts from one section to another. The recurring instances of violence, sex, hunger, longing, and abandonment may seem overemphasized at times, but in fact the usage is probably quite realistic, if not downplayed.
Brock Warner currently lives in Mimico, Ontario. He is the author of the chapbook "Janus Saves" released in Sept / 08.
So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading
Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."
The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.
With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading