“Live Ones”
by Sadie McCarney
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 9-780889-776500
I've reviewed hundreds of books over
the decades, and have developed a kind of ritual before I read a single word of
the text proper. Today Charlottetown poet Sadie McCarney's first book, Live Ones, is under inspection.
A book is a reverent thing. Firstly, I
turn it in my hands, and study the front and back covers. McCarney's slim
cream-coloured volume is adorned with a small purple graphic, Winged Skull / Memento Mori, by artist
Susan Crawford. What does this image suggest about the poems? There will be
sorrow - quite possibly death - addressed within these pages. I flip to the
back, read the publisher's blurb, any other blurbs (usually provided by
accomplished writers), and biographical notes about the author. Here I learn
that McCarney's book "grapples with mourning, coming of age, and queer
identity against the backdrop of rural and small-town Atlantic Canada." First
books often cast a wide net.
Next I check the author's birth year
(just curious), if available; her Acknowledgments (where these poems previously
appeared - impressive); and finally, I scan the individual titles in the
Contents. Titles interest me. They can provide insight into general themes,
style, and mood. Three titles leap out: "Answer and Be Entered to
Win," (first poem); "$90K Victorian, Sold As Is;" and "Fairy
Tale in the Supermarket." But I don't leap to these pages: writers and
editors specifically order the poems, and I respect that they should be read as
presented.
The opening poem is a "found poem culled from dating site
questionnaires," and it's a lark in couplets. Each line asks a
ridiculous question, ie: "Do you ever/
masturbate to spelling mistakes?"
and "In the right light, wouldn't primates be/sexy?" I expect that
this (hopefully) hyperbolic take on online dating questionnaires is making a
statement on modern day relationships, and the title, "Answer and Be Entered
to Win," comments on the gamble - and ridiculousness - inherent in online
dating. It's a fun piece.
"Early Adopters," imagines
female partners queueing for a baby at a "Black Friday sale," after
"the once-fertile town's life-sap/dried up and took the yearly/births
along with it." Clever!
Some of the slice-of-life poems, like a
cancer-riddled aunt's trip to a beach with family, are the strongest: "By
now her innards are carved up/by the cancer, metastasized every/way like the
night's last firework." "Steeltown Songs," is a longer poem
about adolescence and growing up where "Sometimes we skipped our
chalked-in court/our tire swing's welt of spit-out gum".
The book's saturated with fabulous
images, ie: "the shimmer of smashed beer bottles/like low-rent stardust,"
"her hair a Celtic knot of grease" (from "$90K Victorian, Sold
As Is"), and Costa Rican dogs who "luxuriated in their harems/of
flies." In "Fairy Tale in the
Supermarket," lobsters "wear rubber bands/as funeral corsages."
Houses, families, small towns, youth, illness,
"A teacup of ticks" and "A foundered rowboat full of rain."
The 1992-born author of these unflinching poems - varied in style and content -
should be proud of her first book.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“Broken Through”
by J.C. Paulson
Published by Joanne Paulson
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$20.00 ISBN 9-780995-975620
Broken
Through is former Saskatoon journalist J.C. Paulson's
follow-up to her first genre-blending novel, Adam's Witness, and the author's only getting better. In the new
book, heroine Grace Rampling - a Saskatoon StarPhoenix reporter - digs into another
gritty story after a friend's neighbour's dog is shot on the same day there's
been a fatal hit-and-run in Saskatoon. Then: the neighbor, a young dental hygienist
who recently kicked a drinking problem, is found brutally murdered in her home.
And - spoiler alert - she was pregnant. The father? The philandering dentist
she worked for.
That's hardly all: Rampling's romantic partner,
Detective Sergeant Adam Davis (from the earlier book), is investigating the
murder, and the handsome and capable cop quickly connects this crime with
others committed against petite, long-haired brunettes in Saskatoon and
Winnipeg. Can you say serial killer?
The novel definitely earns the moniker
of a mystery, but one could also call it a romance. New lovers Rampling and Davis
are extremely passionate about one another, but both are also being careful.
Davis suffers from PTSD, which manifests in violent nightmares. "I feel
like a piece of glass, sometimes; the tiniest chip makes me shatter," he tells
Rampling. With their complementary careers, the lines between personal and
professional sometimes get blurred for this love-struck couple.
This isn't literary fiction, so you
won't find overly poetic passages that would slow the racing plot, except, on
occasion, when the lovers are regarding one another. Here's Adam, upon seeing
Grace after he's been in California for a conference: "His body was
paralyzed, but his eyes couldn't look at her hard enough. With her tumbled,
wild dark-auburn hair, her magnolia skin, and in her flowing dress, she
reminded him of a crazy, beautiful, windblown wildflower." You will find taut
and believable dialogue, cliffhangers that'll have you flipping pages as fast
as you can, and a story that has more bends than the South Saskatchewan River.
Davis and Police Chief McIvor are
culturally-sensitive characters, and as three of the five victims are Métis
or First Nations women, deep into the novel Davis consults Elder Eileen Bear at
the women's low-security prison for "a clearer understanding of what women,
particularly Indigenous women, are facing, in terms of violence, domestically
and otherwise." There's a reference to BC's "Highway of Tears," and
Bear says the prairie assaults are "our River of Tears". Later,
during a police press conference, Davis explains that the Saskatoon police
force is "going to find and train and hire more Indigenous police officers
as detectives, who will bring cultural understanding to our
investigations." They will also "meet with Elders, particularly women
Elders, on a regular basis."
In her notes, Paulson writes that
whether one reads this "as a murder mystery, a love story, a morality tale
or a fury, [she supposes] it was intended to be all of those." Mission
accomplished.
In the final two chapters of this
satisfying story, Paulson opens the door for further adventures for her
crime-fighting duo. I'll be waiting.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
“In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of
Resilience”
by Helen Knott
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$24.95
ISBN 9-780889-776449
When a novice author earns the praise
of writers like Maria Campbell and Richard Van Camp, it's like a promise:
readers are in for a powerful experience. But Helen Knott's In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of Resilience,
also comes with a warning: the content is "related to addiction and sexual
violence. It is sometimes graphic and can be triggering for readers." The
author suggests that any readers who are triggered "be gentle with
[themselves]." She opens her story by acknowledging other women's painful
memories, and stating that she "gives this in hopes that [they] remember
that [they] are worth a thousand horses." I am already wowed.
As suggested, I'm not alone. Eden
Robinson's written the memoir's foreword, and says Knott - a Dane Zaa, Nehiyaw,
and mixed Euro-descent writer in Northeastern BC - is "one of the most
powerful voices of her generation." Knott's introduction to the compact
hardcover reveals her raison d'être for
the book: "I summoned these words and the healing that comes with them to
lighten the loads of shame, addiction, and struggle" for Indigenous women.
Each of these curses - shame,
addiction, struggle - is apparent from the book's outset. The author and mother
to a son is detoxing from drugs and alcohol on a mattress (not a bed) in
Edmonton. Home is Fort St. John. She's come to the city to "erase"
herself. "My detoxing body had me contracting into a tight ball one minute
and expanding like a starfish the next." So visual. Even poetic. Yet the
author also speaks the vernacular, ie: a year after she, her grandmother
("Asu"), and young son move into her parents' "bitter cold"
home, Knott writes that she "was fucking up six ways until Sunday and then
skipped Sunday and added six more sins."
Via three dramatic sections, Knott ably
demonstrates how "sideways shit went down" and her "adolescence
was riddled with turmoil and shaky soil." Abused from an early age by an
uncle with "pretty severe fetal alcohol syndrome and schizophrenia,"
Knott used cocaine (beginning at age thirteen), alcohol and other drugs to
subdue the demons of perpetual sexual abuse, rape - including a gang rape in
which her attackers cut her and she was found bleeding and naked in a ditch - colonialism,
and racism. The brutal gang attack had the then Grade 9 student begging her
mother to let her move. After six months in Prince George, Knott returned to
find her "mom had disappeared" and "an angry drunken woman [was]
living in her skin."
Disappearance is almost a theme in this
riveting first book. Knott writes: "Us Native women know how to disappear.
It's an art, really - we can disappear even when we are right in front of your
face." Fortunately, through much hard work and disparate therapies - from
reading and rehab to writing and embracing traditional healing practices - this
admirable young writer, mother, presenter, and social worker "reappeared"/healed,
and is using her experience to help others on difficult journeys.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
