By Fayth Simmons
Content warning: reference to sexual misconduct/assault
Gigglepuss, the debut poetry collection of Canadian author Carlie Blume, works to contrive of an adulthood shaped by the past traumas of a checkered youth. Nostalgia features prominently within Blume’s collection, but personal events are recounted as if through an objective lens rather than an inherently subjective and individualized one, being pulled as they are from the author’s childhood. Patriarchal norms are challenged from a vantage point of dynamic youth, and Blume highlights her experiences in a way that projects the truth of them upon the reader without vitiating such truth with the addition of emotional influence. Heavy themes are ruminated upon, such as femininity, sexual abuse, capitalism, environmental destruction, and self-identity and worth in the face of past traumas. Blume explores these topics with simplistic and sharp narration; the description, though lucid and expressive, is arguably distant, despite the emotional potency of the overarching themes.
Blume has a clear and convincing voice, and is not remorseful or overly melancholic in her use of language. It is perhaps for this reason that her poetry is effective in its communication of loss and equally of love. Because poetry is such a subjective genre, it can be difficult to quantify the measure of a collection’s success, but in Gigglepuss, the messaging is not lost to abstraction—it is vivid in its imagery, and evocative in the author’s re-working of a present identity from past images. As Blume comes to terms with multifarious familial and social dynamics and reflects on innate values of youth, she perhaps begins to compose a working understanding of the events that have precipitated her rise to adulthood and parenthood, and her attitude towards them. As a result, her collection is vibrant and layered in its realistic depiction of the female experience, and functions as an ode to self-awareness and actualization atop historical and cultural inhibitions.
Thank you to Guernica Editions for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.