Book Review: Claimings and Other Wild Things by Noelle Schmidt

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Claimings and Other Wild Things, the debut poetry collection from queer, non-binary poet Noelle Schmidt, is filled with echoes, reverberations, becomings, and claimings. It is a gathered collection—a found collection. Schmidt is a poet on the rise, a poet in the making, crackling with self-effacement, and yet bounding with self-worth, learning and growing and finding and filling their place in the Canadian literary world.

The collection is lyrical, verging on confessional, dancing through the effervescence of thought, and landing for brief moments on memory, exploration, finding, and changing, before continuing to flow forward. Pushing against but never resting on structures of contemporary spoken-word poetry, Noelle Schmidt’s speaker loudly asks poignant questions of the world around them. In the titular poem, they exemplify the grandiosity attempted throughout the collection with the metaphoric claiming of self in a glory of the non-binary.

This collection explores the power of claiming, and subsequently the power of the label. The non-binary poet rises to meet me, the non-binary critic, and we both are seen by one another in a beautiful and encapsulating way. The strength and experimentation of the collection exists in the individual poems, rather than in the structure of the whole. What the larger collection does do is present an argumentation for the question and necessity of labels, of definition with the everyday for the non-binary speaker, and both the freedom and limit of those labels.

The authenticity of these poems, in the way that they cling together and yet stand apart, is something quite beautiful. This collection feels like a chrysalis, standing on the edge of its own becoming. The voice of these poems is in a state of agitation and of growing. The agitation comes from the need to shed the old and become what is new. There are many claimings in this collection and many wild things. I look forward to reading what Noelle Schmidt creates next.

Thank you to Latitude 46 Publishing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Ontario Wildlife Photography by Noah Cole

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Noah Coles’ photography is concerned with conservation as much as it is with aesthetics. His latest photography book, Ontario Wildlife Photography, focuses on the wildlife of Ontario and is structured very purposefully to tell a specific story: wilderness being encroached upon by human life and human waste. Breaking his book down into distinct sections, Coles explores everything from birds and mammals to fish and spiders. Each photograph is stamped with the animal’s classification and the date and location of the photograph. They are further accompanied by a micro-essay explaining something about the photo, either how it came to be or something about the animal it contains. Coles’ photographs are beautiful and engaging, with the viewer finding themselves beside and with the animal in question in an intimate yet discreet way. The colours are natural and almost muted without the use of extraneous filters to create light where there is none and colour where there was little.

A photography book in our current hugely over-saturated and image-based society is a difficult feat. In the same way that the camera forever changed the landscape of painters by taking away their steady source of income in portrait painting, the ubiquitous nature of the high-quality phone cameras we carry around constantly and the common nature of over-sharing images from our lives as well as the easily available editing software that exists to make even the most amateurish photograph appear more professional creates a strange pressure for professional photographers.

Portrait photography and high fashion photography where the image is highly manipulated is one thing, but the kind of nature photography that Coles is capturing here is becoming almost commonplace, begging the question of what makes it stand out. His photos are undeniably skillful and his presence near the wildlife in question without causing them distress is perhaps where the main aspect of his skill lies. His lack of photo manipulation is to be commended and stands in stark contrast to the photos which populate so much of social media, making them a unique commodity in book form. The photographs in this book are strong, and the micro-essays describing each are interesting and engaging, carrying a unique “I voice” behind the camera, yet the format of the book is severely lacking. With large block photographs set on the top half of each starkly white page, each the same size and shape, and a block of black text set in ragged right underneath each image, the format does nothing to highlight the talent of this photographer.

Noah Coles is clearly an interesting voice in the contemporary landscape of nature conservation and wildlife photography. His photos luxuriate in the everydayness of his subjects, without intruding on their habitat or space. He manages to get photographs where the subject is often looking directly at him—a raccoon gazing pensively into the camera; a fox pausing to almost say hello—without ever anthropomorphizing them. By including photographs of humans assisting in conservation and clean-up efforts in the “Mammals” section of the book, Coles does not shy away from the fundamental and inherent connection between humans and nature. We are part of nature, after all, inextricably linked to every aspect of it. Noah Coles’ book shows ways that we can more harmoniously live together.

Thank you Dundurn Press for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Francie's Got a Gun by Carrie Snyder

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Content warning: drug use

In her latest novel Francie’s Got a Gun, Carrie Snyder demonstrates her narrative skill through a non-linear plot that circles, rotates, runs around, and hops between the narrow points of view of those orbiting the titular Francie, a young girl—with a gun. Francie is running, running, breathing, singing, but always running. The rhythm of this book is fast and yet syncopated. It flits between the differing narrative perspective of Francie’s mother, father, grandmother, baby brother, best friend, best friend’s sister, choir instructor, and more to create a rounded outline of how and why and when Francie got a gun. The gun is what matters. The gun is the story.

Snyder uses clipped sentences and quick shifts to make the reader never feel quite at home in this intricately built-up world of one small, struggling family with the broken door and the car that is never where it should be when it should be and the father you can never quite lock down. Capturing the frantic interior life of childhood and its dependency on deeply intertwining friendships of climbing trees and make believe, Snyder’s world is breathtaking. It is a difficult place to live in for too long, as the reader runs and runs with Francie, and just like her, never really understands why or how. We just know that we can’t stop. Mustn’t stop. Falling ever more ahead of itself, Snyder’s structure nestles within it prose which morphs effortlessly into the lived reality of each character, whether it be Mikey’s changing fast food order depending on who is calling him and if he wants to pretend he is better than he is (and then immediately regretting his choice of chicken wrap and diet pop over the fries he really wanted), or grandmother Irene’s harsh awareness of her own inability to stop talking or to keep from pretending that everything is just fine when it so thoroughly is not.

Snyder is a deft writer of fiction. Her movements are effortless. She manages to wrangle a nonlinear plot with notable astuteness. Her plot runs backwards and forwards, this way and that, from one minute point of view to the next until finally, with the relief of understanding and letting go, a full picture is formed. Until finally, heartachingly, we understand why Francie has a gun.

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: As Glenn As Can Be by Sarah Ellis and Nancy Vo

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Sarah Ellis’s wonderful children’s book depicting the life, talent, and stark individuality of the great Canadian composer and pianist Glenn Gould is a joy to behold. Ellis’s words are nestled among the haunting cool-toned watercolours of Nancy Vo, each illustration capturing the essence of the page’s text. This is a book about the necessity and beauty of self-expression, self-love, and self-acceptance, as we look to Glenn Gould for inspiration to be as “us” as we can be.

Glenn Gould, born in Toronto 1932, is a legend of Canadian and international classical music, with his Goldberg Variations becoming a staple of nearly every classical music collection. His talent for the piano and for composition became apparent at a very early age, as did his predilection for what may be called eccentricity. Gould has become well known in Canada and throughout the world for his unique talent but also his poignant disinterest in performance. Music for Gould was a singular occupation in which the audience had little part. Sarah Ellis explores this.

Ellis’s book is rhythmic, moving backward and forward through questioning and answering, listing the likes and dislikes of the growing Glenn who occupies her pages. Glenn is trying to find his way through the strange world that he finds himself a part of, where people can be cruel, where the piano makes perfect sense but he is only allowed to play for a limited time each day, and where animals such as his dog Nicky are cherished friends,  and people look at him as strange for his musical ability but also his insistence on living according to his own comfort. Ellis uses this rhythm of likes and dislikes in a perfect lullaby of reassurance to the reader that their actual self, their self which likes some things and does not like others, is enough just as it is and should be celebrated. The narrative voice speaks to the reader of its own likes and dislikes as much as to Glenn’s.

The narrative follows Glenn as he finds a way to make music the way that he wants to make music. Vo’s illustrations bring this into light as musical notes drift across pages. Vo’s illustrations keep the reader firmly with Glenn, using a cool palette of blues and yellows to allow the reader to sink into the page and hold space with Glenn in his own environment. Despite the possibility of the reader understanding the desire of the audience to clap and bang their feet and cheer, these illustrations and Ellis’s meticulously formed text keep us firmly with Glenn when such things bring discomfort. This tension is exacerbated until finally released as Glenn finds a way to make music in his own way.

As Glenn as Can Be is the story of an individual finding their way into the world in exactly the way that they are able to be. The Glenn of this book inspires readers, children, and adults alike to find a way to do the things that they love in exactly the way that is best for them.

Thank you to Groundwood Books for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Daughters of the Occupation by Shelly Sanders

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Content warning: sexual violence, racial violence, genocide

Shelly Sanders’s upcoming novel Daughters of the Occupation is a fictionalized family history based on true events. Sanders painstakingly recreates the lives of three Jewish women affected by the Soviet invasion of Latvia and subsequent invasion by the Nazis. Affected seems too flippant a word. Forged in. Destroyed by. Forever changed by. Like so many European Jewish families who emigrated—fled—to America in search of acceptance and freedom and to escape the persecution and violence of the war, Sarah, the protagonist of Sanders’s novel, comes from a family that has been torn apart by war. Raised an American Catholic, Sarah has spent her life unaware of her Jewish identity or of the history of her mother’s family. Following her mother’s sudden death and the subsequent illness of her estranged grandmother, Sarah begins down a path of family secrets towards a history she never conceived of and from which she had been, up until now, carefully kept. During an impulsive trip to Soviet-controlled Latvia (the year being 1976) and an impromptu meeting with an American professor of Russian architecture who is able to translate for her, Sarah finds herself on a journey towards someone her mother and grandmother could only dream of, to find answers they have spent their lives in search of.

I won’t spoil anything because the story itself really is fabulous.

Sanders writes a family legend. Her words string together the intertwining lives of grandmother, mother, and daughter. Her structure is strong, finding its roots deep in the violent history of Latvia. The language, especially in dialogue, is heightened—the way we wish people spoke rather than the way they really do, risking a loss of the suspended disbelief. The story of Sanders’s novel feels real, hitting the firm beats of chronology and necessity with precision—this happened at this time, leading to this. It is the in-between bits which are less strong. The narrative voice has trouble bouncing back and forth between the double timeline of the 1940s and 1970s. It is too modern and yet too archaic to fit seamlessly in either timeline. It lacks sophistication in its use of metaphor and its overuse of cliché, as well as having several micro plot holes where assumptions are made by characters which have little basis in the text itself.

We need to be careful in the ways we talk about, write about, and subsequently mythologize war and genocide, particularly the Holocaust, WWII, and the Cold War. Sanders makes broad stroke claims about the nature of freedom and oppression—American is freedom, Latvia is oppression—when in our contemporary landscape, our views of freedom, oppression, structural inequality, and institutionalised racism have expanded and become much more nuanced, although there is still a lot of work to be done. Every human being is of value. We as tellers of stories, particularly those of grief, tend to fall into patterns of comparison. That is to say, especially in stories of the Holocaust, we seem to expect that if a certain level of inhumanity and violence did not occur then the stories are not valuable. Every human being who lives through a large-scale trauma is affected by that trauma, in small ways and in large ways. Sanders’s narrator focuses on specific aspects of the suffering of her main characters to an exorbitant degree that feels as through their pain is trying to be explained or justified. It risks lapsing into the fetishization of grief, trauma, and victimhood, or more specifically, the fetishization of those who survive.

Whatever else it may be, Daughters of the Occupation is an enjoyable story of family intrigue and the secrets forced upon unwilling keepers by the nature, not only of war, but of the specific kind of war committed by the Nazis against the Jewish people—an attempted eradication of Jewish families and their stories. While Sanders’s novel may fall short in some areas of craft and perhaps her narrative style may require further refinement, she is still doing the incredibly important work of telling the unflinching story of a Jewish family, ripped apart by the Nazis, who managed to continue. It is essential that these stories continue to be told, to be felt, and to be held, so as never to allow hatred and bigotry to eradicate the lives of the people they chose to hate. We must look without fear at the pain, the love, the laughter, and the lives of these families. The essential act is the telling itself. 

Thank you to HarperCollins Canada for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Spawn by Marie-Andrée Gill

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Marie-Andrée Gill’s poetry collection Spawn, available to my English eyes only through the 2020 translation by Kristen Renee Miller, is miraculous. It is sparse and poignant. Each poem sits on the page as an individual presence as well as a distinct movement between the sections of the collection as a whole. Imagery of water and splitting and towering run back and forth throughout the collection. 

Gill’s speaker is tied tightly to the life cycle of the ouananiche. Filled with imagery of a nostalgic 90s childhood, of a finding and seeking, of a coming together, and of a moving farther apart, Gill’s speaker moves through the sections of the poetry collection as the ouananiche move from the lake to the river. Birth, growth, spawning and eventually death. The ouananiche are everything. And we are spawning, and we are falling. 

“Timushum says: Only thunderstorms still tell it / like it is.”

“I am a village that doesn’t have a choice,” Gill writes, and I can’t stop focusing on the language. “And the lake, a luck, the lake.” I think of poetry as the building of words, the specific choosing and holding of individuals, linking to create lines and forming together in the culmination of image, tension, and that strange sense of sound in which words exist as muted silences on the page. A silence which sound is somehow filled in for, sitting at the back of our ears, inside the bones of our skulls. Gathered consonants create staccato rhythms inside themselves. But here—but here—I feel as if I am standing on one side of a waterfall, and Marie-Andrée Gill is standing on the other, speaking clearly and firmly, but I can’t hear her. I keep screaming what??, but I can’t hear her, and there is someone running back and forth telling me what was said, but everything feels staggered and lost, its resonance lingering and reverberating in the afterbeat, but the potency is diluted. The poetry itself is lost somewhat to me, and the translator is ever-present. But I want the poet.  

Incredibly aware of her presence as translator, Miller writes a beautiful translator’s note towards the end of the book in which she discusses her own connection to Gill’s work as well as the deeply rooted and problematized nature of language throughout the collection in and of itself. Miller is clearly incredibly aware of the role of the translator as bearer and caregiver of their translations. And Gill’s work is twice removed. Written in the colonizer language of French, Gill’s speaker is deeply connected to the world of her Ilnu ancestors but also ripped from that connectedness by the violence of colonization. 

“To lick the skin of the water / with a tongue I don’t speak” as the language that should have been the speaker’s birthright has been denied over and over again. Removed from ancestry through something as fundamentally vicious as the forced loss of the ability to understand and to speak. Forced conformity with European imperialistic standards. And what do we lose in the translation? And here I read the colonized words translated for the ease of another colonizer. And I wonder if these words are for me at all. 

I stand still on the edge of the lake and I wait. The words of each poem float up towards me, and I want to get closer to them. Can’t quite get close enough. 

Book Review: Scorpion Season by Tara McGowan-Ross

By Meredith Grace Thompson

I swore I would stop 

apologizing in matters of sex and business, so instead I say: 

thank you for your time and your interest in this project. 

There is this old folktale about a scorpion and a fox—sometimes it’s a frog—in which the scorpion asks the fox to carry it across the river because it cannot swim. The fox refuses because it knows how dangerous the scorpion is but the scorpion begs, promising not to sting the fox at any point on their journey. The scorpion seems genuine and so the fox, who is not a cruel animal, finally agrees to ferry the scorpion across. And so they set out into the river, the fox paddling with the scorpion perched atop its back. Halfway across the river the scorpion stings the fox. As its body fills with poison the fox looks back and asks: Why have you done this? Now we are both going to die. The scorpion says only, I am sorry, but it is my nature. 

The point of this story, I suppose, is to be wary of scorpions, assuming the listener identifies entirely with the fox, because scorpions will always sting you even if they promise otherwise. But what of the scorpion? What of the creature who cannot help but follow its nature, even if that nature causes it to drown without malicious intent? 

Scorpion Season, a poetry collection by Montréal-based Mi’kmaw poet Tara McGowan-Ross, seems to ask this very question, with “coping mechanisms so strong they may kill her.” The collection is as immersive as a sensory deprivation tank. You enter the book and the world is dark; sound muffled in that particularly meditative way where air is heavy and you find yourself submerged fully in each poem. They begin to ring, softly at first, and then louder and louder. The collection walks the tightrope of confessional poetry, which risks melodrama if it is not masterfully handled. But McGowan-Ross is a master. She dances through each poem, landing on distinctive beats and luxuriating in each line while propelling onto the next. McGowan-Ross creates the through lines of the collection, weaving between each stand-alone poem with the dimensionality of a novel. Scorpion Season follows the creation of a speaker as seen through differing accounts by minor characters all of whom weave together the story of a self in its formation, dealing with identity, addiction, eating disorders, friendship, love, self-love, academia, philosophy, family, and grief.  

The underlying beat of the collection is strong, giving McGowan-Ross space to use staccato notes, dancing softly on the syncopated beat. The beat changes, as do the syncopations, but McGowan-Ross’s skill is consistently shown throughout. The form remains close knit yet mouldable—as gauze over a wound. McGowan-Ross has an innate understanding of form, to rival any contemporary poet. Embedding trope, formal structure, mixed chronology, and more experimental styles including psychiatrist’s notes and emails with mysteriously redacted names, McGowan-Ross moves seamlessly throughout the seemingly sporadic yet meticulously intentional chronology of the collection (sometimes jumping between years from one poem to the next) to create an articulated self which expresses much more than its own selfhood.  

Churning through grief in physical form, through the carried intergenerational trauma of waves of colonized peoples in the folds of an individual body, through self-loathing, through causing the fox beneath you to drown, the speaker of McGowan-Ross’s collection is magnanimous. McGowan-Ross is a delight on paper. Her delightfulness radiates to make you wish she was the friend sitting next to you filled with laughter and stories of youthful rambunctiousness until far too early in the morning. 

In one interpretation, the tale of the scorpion and the fox presupposes the reality and functionality of a precise human nature; “mental defect: philosophy degree.” A secondary interpretation views the fable as a comment on individual nature. We are a composite of our contexts; “a psychologist tells me we repeat our parents’ habits in love and money. my immediate family history is one of resource mismanagement.” We are a mosaic of everything that we are or were or can be. All these things create our nature. 

NATIONALITY: Colonized 

RACE: Restless 

INSURANCE: handouts 

PRIMARY CARE: Alcohol

Scorpion Season is a revelatory look inside/beside/behind/in front of/and towards a mystical creature called woman/human/queer/philosopher/pervert/poet/artist/friend/daughter/sister/mother/lover/mentor/self and always (and always) filled with promises. 

I promise not to egg your house or cause a scene at your work

Book Review: I Love You, Call Me Back by Sabrina Benaim

By Meredith Grace Thompson

 In I Love You, Call Me Back, Sabrina Benaim’s words speak directly into my mouth with a pre-pandemic intimacy which makes my skin shudder. Her speaker lives in isolation, compelled by brief interludes of virtual contact, distinctly within the moment of a summer in lockdown. She breathes video chats and walking her dog, cups of coffee on the stoop, and bird song. Her days are filled with cleaning rituals and phone calls with her mother and cooking. Her mind seems to exist within her body—tied very much to her body and yet floating beyond it somehow. Her relationships have become distances without intention . She watches her new nephew grow through a computer screen and listens to her sick mother describe what will come after she is gone, over the telephone.  

i am watching my nephew laugh for the first time 

through a screen 

i am watching my mother watch my nephew laugh (p.24)

Encapsulating the strangeness of pandemic isolation, Benaim writes a temporary yet inexhaustible reflection and refraction of self. Self-love; self-indulgence masquerading as self-care; self-care morphing into unfettered self-hatred, clawing its way back up up up into a healing, a growing together. A scar tissue collective sprouting into a blossoming nuance of form. 

She cascades through an inconsistently poignant use of capital letters— a lowercase i showing perhaps the deterioration self, perhaps the oneness of self. She captures through poetic form the layered depths of the rabbit hole which isolation opens up in the mind of the isolated. And while her body might be doing this or that, the mind of Benaim’s speaker is not limited to the same apartment, city, or time, but rather traverses freely through what came before and what is yet to come. Dreaming and daydreaming together at once. 

Benaim captures a moment of forced stillness, forced separation, relocation, and reflection where everything feels stalled, stagnant, reflective, spinning, and without a clear sense of time. Dates mark some of the poems to allow the reader a foothold within this swirling, mesmerising world, but being swept up into those swirling waters is the joy of Benaim’s writing. 

i have vivid dreams 

in all of them 

my mother is alive (p. 98)

A world which becomes comfortable to the speaker, at risk of perhaps not wanting to leave again.  

I hope the mail 

stays undelivered 

I do not wish 

to have my belongings back. (p. 57)

Benaim’s explorations of a self inside the extenuating circumstances of the pandemic are to be commended. Her poetry is fearless in its content, ranging from the deeply intimate nature of mental health and discussions of depression and body image, to the wild intimacy of the utterly mundane details of daily life (one poem is an excellent recipe for roasted cauliflower). For what could be more intimate than to be invited into the everyday of another human being, simply existing? The collection as a whole is a moment perfectly captured, leaving the reader with aftertastes of sunbeams and heavy summer air brimming with the strange daydreaming silence of mid-pandemic lockdown. 

...You bring yellow flowers

 every Monday when you arrive home. 

I keep them out on the wooden table 

no taller than a tulip standing 

on the shoulders of another tulip. (p. 23)

Book Review: The Buddhist Chef's Vegan Comfort Cooking by Jean-Philippe Cyr

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Vegan Comfort Cooking is very much what the title claims it to be. It is comfort made vegan; replicating non-vegan dishes using vegan ingredients so that the animal product non-consumer can enjoy the comfort of animal products without the ethical ramifications. Dishes such as meatballs, vegan Hamburger Helper, and burgers trail throughout the book. With an introduction and a breakdown of his pantry from self-proclaimed Buddhist chef Jean-Philippe Cyr, the book focuses very much on Cyr’s life, philosophy, and vegan food staples.  

The recipes are laid out clearly and thoughtfully. Instructions are easy to follow, and results are consistent. The recipes themselves are strong enough to be adjusted slightly without losing their integrity. The physical book is a good size and stays open on the counter easily. It is full of bright photographs showing each dish’s completed look. Glossy photographs also feature Cyr, showing him to be a handsome white male who is clearly being used to sell this particular brand of whitewashed veganism and Buddhism—his relationship with Buddhism is highlighted several times throughout in a way that gives me pause. But more on that later. 

In the same way that Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop sells a particular product to a particular class of people, this book assumes a level of economic privilege. There is a clear attempt to make these meals easy and pantry ready, but the presupposition of a wealthy person’s pantry is difficult to miss. That being said, the meals were yummy and warm in that particular way only comfort food can be. The goal is clear, and it is reached. I would simply ask if the goal is worth reaching for. 

The notion that food is not highly political is naïve to say the least. Within the confines of capitalism those who have access to veganism and to stylized healthy living are separated from those that do not. These lines are often racialized and always based on class. Western capitalism makes it incredibly difficult for those with lesser means to participate in this lifestyle. We actively discourage it, as a society. There are several levels of gatekeeping happening with this book which extend beyond the politicization of food into the fetishization of othered cultures and especially Eastern religions by white colonizers in order to sell themselves as somehow unique on a colonial, capitalistic stage. 

I am speaking here not of individuals but rather of systems wherein culture is appropriated by dominant groups, scooping out the bits that are seen as desirable and leaving behind everything else, leaving cultures violated and torn apart. I don’t know Jean-Philippe Cyr personally. I know nothing about his relationship with Buddhism nor with veganism. But his self-identification as “the Buddhist Chef” feels morally bankrupt in that it is an aspect of cultural currency. What would he be without it? Simply “the chef”—a label far too vague to have individualistic claim. Unless of course you are Bruce Springsteen, a.k.a., “The Boss.” 

I am also struck by the moral implications of a vegan diet heavily supplemented by soy. Cyr claims that we now “have a better understand of where our food comes from and how our dietary choices impact the planet.” And yet, he has chosen to write a book that features soy products to an alarming degree—soy products which are largely owned by the monopoly that is Monsanto, an unethical company that has routinely sued farmers for patent infringement when seeds have sprouted in their fields from transfer by wind. 

Human beings are creatures of contradiction. Having been written by a performative and slightly oblivious person of immense privilege does not make Jean-Philippe Cyr’s book unworthy of reading, I don’t think. Try the leek rolls, they are amazing! But it brings to mind the essay of fabulous Oji-Cree-Salteaux writer jaye simpson, entitled “#whiteveganwitches” from Poetry is Dead Magazine issue 17: coven. I come back to this essay and again and again in my own thinking about colonialism, privilege, and capitalism. simpson states:

Let’s talk about white vegan witches for one moment. Let’s talk about the classism and layers of privilege to be able to practice veganism and witchcraft. Let’s talk about how these white witches shame people and women of colour for the use of animals in their diets and cultural practices. 

Let’s talk about the inaccessibility of veganism and vegetarianism: how unstable food security is in POC communities due to systemic and societal racism. 

The essay ends with an invitation to discuss; with an opening. This is where I would like to end also. I want to discuss this, and the way we digest cookbooks more generally. The way we allow our food to be controlled and the way that we attempt to control the food of others—whether that is by being vegan or by being against veganism. There is a lot to unpack here. But I do not believe that it can be so simple as to say one thing is invalid because the other is true. 

Book Review: The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter

By Meredith Grace Thompson

 Mussolini or Bacon? 

He is fundamentally a colourist, in the childish sense. He draws simple pictures and he colours them in. 

Max Porter is a strange and wonderful writer. His novels are quick and sprawling. Fast moving and yet in a near-permanent standstill of philosophising, each novel exists in the back of the reader’s mind long after it has been put down. He has a gift for capturing the immediacy of poetry in the larger narrative format of a novel, even if relatively speaking, his novels are short. Without his distinct self-declaration and identification of this work as novel, The Death of Francis Bacon could be labeled purely as experimental, climbing, ardent, grim, needful poetry. 

Living inside the moments of the 1992 death of Irish-born painter Francis Bacon, Porter luxuriates in the strains of human consciousness without stepping into the cliché of a “life flashing before one’s eyes.” His words peak and fall, disintegrate and rebuild themselves as a human heartbeat, as human brainwaves. As much a comment on the speaker’s own obsession with Bacon—both as subject and as artist—Porter’s narrative voice floats evenly throughout the world of the novel. Moving from the speaker to Bacon himself without explanation or handholding, Porter creates an amalgamated self: a self inside itself, undifferentiable between writer and subject, speaker and spoken. 

Playing with the implicit assumption of his subject’s namesake, Porter moves as effortlessly as human thought through taxi cabs and marital fights and lost cigarettes. Each section is differentiated by sequential numbering as well as the material and dimensions of the painting which follows, rather than chapter titles. Porter writes through each painting, creating each poetic prose piece as a potentially painted poem inside the larger context of a novel. These are paintings. These are colourings-in. These are movements within the strand which connects the multiplicity of selves. Porter’s speaker is reaching out to Bacon and Bacon is radiating towards the speaker. 

This structure is Porter’s strength and is consistent throughout several of his novels. He does not seem to judge himself as a writer, rather takes that which he understands or seeks to understand and allows himself to climb through and over and under it. He looks at it from all angles. He holds it close and pushes it away. He is remarkably free in his writing. 

Porter excels at using the art of others to better understand and create his own art. The paintings of Francis Bacon are grotesque and layered, their colours bright and unknowable. They sit inside the mind, reaching out towards you without hesitation. They are images of popes and kings, portraits beyond all else. They are stark and frightening, and if you look at the paintings only after reading this book, they will click into place as that which Porter has created—not models but rather interpretive dances. Porter is a weaver of images, a reader, an art historian, a lover of creation more than anything else. His book is a love letter, a disintegration of love, a recognition of love: the reception of a genius in ingenious terms. Porter manages to capture the moment of no longer knowing, the breakdown of human thought. The painting that is left behind. And after it all intenta descansar. Try to get some rest. 

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Probably Ruby by Lisa Bird-Wilson

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Probably Ruby is a radiating constellation of people, places, moments, dreams, and memories, all moving together in order to weave together the web that is a life—a created self—in the protagonist of Ruby Valentine.  

Robbed of her Indigeneity by being labeled “French” rather than “Métis” on her adoption paperwork in order to be kept out of Saskatchewan’s 1960–70s AIM (Adopt Indian Métis) program, Ruby spends her life feeling outside of those around her. She is pushed to the periphery, unwanted and yet specifically chosen. Bird-Wilson uses the formulation of her protagonist’s existence to ask the decidedly philosophical question: What is freedom? Can freedom be an option if there are no choices available?  

Structurally, Bird-Wilson creates a web of intersecting vignettes. Each scene casts a new and different light on the protagonist, showing the intricate and often unknowable ways in which lives intersect with and echo through one another, even after individuals are gone. Some relationships are clear, some less so, but all are necessary.  

The question of choosing and being chosen is repeated throughout the novel, asking its reader if it is possible for family to be something chosen, or if family must be tied to biological lineage. Ruby, born to a teenaged mother never given the option to keep her despite desperately trying, does not take her adopted mother’s word that to be chosen is somehow better than to simply belong. Rather, she searches for faces and names that tie her to her birth family, needing and at times creating stories and images that anchor her to a shared history. 

Bird-Wilson’s narrator is not tied to Ruby but rather wanders poignantly throughout the novel’s landscape, dropping into the consciousness of Ruby’s teenage mother, fighting as best she can to keep the baby that is being torn from her by the state, by the church, and by her own family. This narrative viewpoint gifts the reader with the knowledge that Ruby can never have—what her mother and her father are feeling and thinking. The book’s opening pages contain a drawing entitled “Ruby’s Relationship Web” which shows hand-drawn names and criss-crossing, doubling-back lines that envelope, share, and amplify. Ruby is an amalgamation of these lines. 

But Ruby also becomes a user and disposer of people. Her agency seems to have been warped, as if the only real power she can maintain is that of running away. She was a thing sought to be forgotten from the onset. She was life created in a way deemed wrong by the colonial Catholic authorities. 

Imagery of spiders repeats throughout the novel, as Ruby allows a daddy-long-legs to crawl through her hair as she sits, diametrically opposed as an unwanted and yet also chosen child, in the backyard of her adoptive mother. Choice has been removed from the lives of Ruby’s family, layer by layer. Her mother, white, poor, and young, was never given the choice to keep her child, shamed for the fact that the boy she loved was Indigenous, and for her Indigenous baby—light enough that “she could be passed” (p. 126), but still born out of wedlock. 

Ruby’s running is reflected and refracted by the women in her family web, who are constantly running. Running towards and yet constantly away in the same splitting instant. Ruby Valentine is a woman created of moments of interiority. She exists, so fully formed a human, with such a radiating web of connection, it is impossible not to wonder how your own web may intersect with hers and to admire Lisa Bird-Wilson’s craftsmanship in creating it. 

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor by Sally Armstrong

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Charlotte Taylor’s story requires very little introduction to be completely enthralling. A maverick woman in a time when agency was denied to those of her gender, Taylor was a human being to be marvelled at. Written by her great-great-great-granddaughter Sally Armstrong, The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor is a fictionalised account of the life of the woman who has become legend in Tabusintac, New Brunswick.  

The story begins on her voyage fleeing her home in England with her family’s Black butler, with whom young Charlotte has fallen deeply in love. They hope to make a home for themselves in Jamaica, but after a terrible accident in a foreign land where she has no rights and no protection, Charlotte Taylor finds herself alone and unmarried—and very much with child. 

Talking her way onto a merchant naval ship with a compassionate captain, Taylor manages to make her way north to the shores of eastern Canada. Through the narrative of this fictional Taylor’s life, Armstrong manages to embed some of the history of European settlement in Atlantic Canada, moving through the history of the Acadians and their deportation and eventual and struggling return, to the Mi’kmaq tribes and their relationship with British settlers, as well as the nature of settlers’ land rights as land shifted from Nova Scotia to the newly formed province of New Brunswick. 

Charlotte Taylor’s story is one of perseverance and endurance. Living well into old age, the novel looks at the expanse of her life—her survival of the brutal Atlantic winters, her nine children by four different fathers, her three marriages and three separate experiences of being widowed, and her lifelong friendship and love affair with a Mi’kmaq man. Othered by her sex and the seemingly inescapable misogyny of the men around her—including her father, husbands, and even eventually her sons—Charlotte Taylor refused to conform to what was expected of her, and yet always did what was necessary for her family. Armstrong’s connection to her protagonist is clear, as the narrative feels like an elongated family legend being told over the remnants of a large dinner. 

Armstrong paints Taylor as the mythical figure of the Canadian white settler. She battles the elements, overcomes infringements on her rights as best she can, raises her children fiercely, and has a special relationship with the Mi’kmaq band nearby. While I have no doubt that many of these characteristics are true, I am forced to wonder at the level of mythologizing which occurs in these pages. Charlotte Taylor is a strong woman, a hero of female worth and emancipation, but she is also steeped in white privilege. Encased and cocooned in her own assumed gentleness and dependant on the kindness of strangers who unquestioningly give her the “benefit of the doubt” (so intrinsic to whiteness and all the privileges that are attached to it), Charlotte Taylor manages to skate through life in a way that women of colour or a lower class would not have been able to. While attempting to be respectful and inclusive of the Indigenous experience of Atlantic Canada, Armstrong’s depiction of the gentle Wioche, the Mi’kmaq man Charlotte loves her entire life, is problematic. Taylor never considers building a home or a life with Wioche, and seems to use him only for emotional support during her own times of need. She never seems to ask him anything about himself or allow him agency of his own. This portrayal, if not falling headfirst into Indigenous fetishization and tokenism, certainly teeters on the edge of it. 

Armstrong’s narrative is clean, focused, and meticulously plotted. The plot rushes forward at nearly breakneck speeds, racing through years while lingering on and luxuriating in defining moments. The narrative voice is however decidedly contemporary, sometimes unintentionally breaking the illusion constructed by well-crafted historical fiction with overtly modern words or phrases. But this is made up for by the veracity of the protagonist herself. Charlotte Taylor is a force to be reckoned with. Radically open, with a wildness of spirit and an abundance of self-worth, Taylor falls in love quickly and easily. And you will in turn fall in love with her too.  

Thank you to Penguin Random House for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review: Set-Point by Fawn Parker

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Content warning: eating disorder and body dysmorphia 

Fawn Parker’s 2019 novel Set-Point depicts the world of Lucy Frank, a writer and recent MFA graduate living and working in Montréal, scouring the precarious world of Anglophone work that the city allows. Lucy’s story begins in a warehouse office where she is working as a janitor for a start-up that, for unknown reasons, are developing a shuttlecock launching robot they are incredibly serious about. Lucy works during the day, unsure exactly what she is doing or why she is doing it, smokes cigarettes and drinks endless cups of coffee, attends book launches at night, and works on funding applications for her MFA project—a miniseries of Seinfeld episodes inhabited by the characters from Karl Ove Knausgård’s epic autofiction series My Struggle. 

The post-modernist, ironical, yet painfully self-aware and hyper-realistic structure of the novel makes immediate sense as soon as these two facets of the character come to light. Each cigarette and cup of black coffee feels an homage to Knausgård himself. Each ridiculous situation amplified to extremes through human error and selfishness, from a store robbery gone wrong to a lost bike being painted over outside the previously held apartment of Leonard Cohen, feels Seinfeldian in its proportions, with characters simply walking away from any situation that gets too heightened with little thought for consequences. And yet, unlike Seinfeld itself, Lucy suffers very real consequences. Parker’s skill in weaving together the opposing forms of autofiction depicted through Knausgård and Seinfeld is delightful to witness; one drenched in satire and the other submerged entirely in the mundane seeming randomness of daily life. Two such differing source materials about the same thing: nothing, creating a hybrid of nothingness.

The nothingness of Lucy’s life expands to fill and consume everything; a life being made up of a whole bunch of nothing as if enough nothing quantifies itself into something. Lucy is an incredibly self-aware protagonist with an almost shocking unawareness of her authentic self. She is aware of herself as a performance and yet seems to have no interest in moving beyond it: “I could perform a certain type of femininity so long as there were no other women by my side, doing it better.”  Lucy’s desire is not to be honest with herself but rather to be liked. “[My shampoo] was lavender-scented, which I hated but knew other people liked, so I tried to imagine it smelling good to me.”  

The narrative voice stays tied to Lucy’s internal monologue, never accessing anyone else’s interior life. Dealing with the pervasive nature of the male gaze, female competition within that gaze, alienation from unskilled labour, digital sex-work, body dysmorphia, an eating disorder that consumes the entirety of her food and beverage consumption as well as most thoughts, Lucy feels trapped by the self she is when she is alone.  She longs to “lock [herself] inside [her] social persona,” which she understands to be more desirable and therefore more worthy of her energy.  

Trips to Seinfeld themed pop-up restaurants in downtown Montréal, and the relaxation of the white noise of a Knausgård Vice interview are layered throughout, juxtaposing the maleness of both these autofiction structures Parker is playing with against the societal limits of Lucy’s femaleness as Lucy does not allow herself to understand herself as a serious person, not even in relations to her mother’s cancer diagnosis.  

“I envied the self-seriousness of men like Karl Ove. They chain-smoked cigarettes indoors, mused about art, politics, love. Everything they did was being done for the first time, by the first man. I, on the other hand, viewed myself through the critical lens of the at-home audience.”

Parker presents a life in stark lighting, not covering the edges to make it neater, not creating causal chains that lead to plot devices but rather letting things appear as random and unintentional and sometimes confusing as they are in real life. Parker’s talent as a writer is clear. There are a few moments where the plot flicks almost too quickly for comprehension, but it is sustained through Parker’s consistent style and her desire to take on the larger existential projects of what makes and remakes a self. Lucy Frank feels like a fully formed human being, existing outside the pages of the book. Each chapter feels fresh, each revelation of character feels organic and true to the multi-faceted ways in which human beings don’t always make sense; the way we hold conflicting views and violate the law of non-contradiction nearly every day of our lives. We believe one thing, and yet, we behave in another way entirely.  

Lucy Frank feels somehow akin to me and yet could not be farther away. She speaks things I would barely allow myself to think, and yet, she lives an honestly heartbreaking reflection of the toxicity of patriarchal value systems and their degradation of the female psyche. Lucy Frank’s story does not end here—we simply stop reading. Parker leaves us with the sense that this character will continue in the world that we inhabit, possibly forever, making impulsive life decisions and never entirely learning from her mistakes, being unlikeable and yet strangely lovable. 

Book Review: A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

By Meredith Grace Thompson

Content warning: coarse language, violence, racism, homophobia 

Billy-Ray Belcourt’s first book of prose, defined in tiny print on a beautifully collaged cover as memoir, is magnanimous. A continuation of the strong voice established in his previous poetic works, A History of My Brief Body is a series of lingering essays, each bookmarking an event, time, idea, or moment of becoming in the weaving together of poetry, theory, social commentary, and phenomenological embodiment. Belcourt offers up an ontology of queerness, Indigeneity, and what it is to be a self inside of a body or a body inside of a self, pressing up against a world which intentionally pushes you away. The actualities of the ecosystem of racism in which all Canadians swim come starkly to light in scenes where Belcourt’s speaker comes face to face with public health systems—“Hospitals have always been enemy territory. My body, too brown to be innocent, enflames the nurses’ racialized curiosity”—as well as sexual fetishization of queer Indigenous men. Looking at the echoing and yet constantly present nature of colonialism and the deeply ingrained culture of white, cis, heteronormative supremacy, Belcourt questions and illuminates systems of dominance and oppression from both the macro and hyper-individualistic levels.   

Belcourt’s narrator is a fictionalized or perhaps intellectualized or perhaps hyper-realistic version of himself. He is expansive in his discourse. Looking at the colonial constructions of gender and enforced normative performance of a European masculinity, Belcourt examines the ways in which white patriarchal ideas of domination have colonized Indigenous lives, ricocheting throughout Indigenous communities and oppressing those within further, as men taught violent masculinity “bombard the lives of women and girls, two-spirit peoples, and queers.” Using fragmentation and philosophy rather than fiction, Belcourt recounts the lived rather than invented nature of a life in poetry, balanced precariously within a theoretical framework: “as a poet I couldn’t break the habit of trying to make the world and thus my lived life into an art object.” But “no one runs to theory unless there is a dirt road in [them]” and theory can often be our greatest and most poetic escape.  

Belcourt writes the philosophy I have always wanted to read. Connected to the intimacies of his own life and yet expansive as great ideas necessitate, Belcourt is one of the strongest voices in contemporary Canadian literature. A History of My Brief Body is a perfect example of a hybrid in-between-ness. This book, free from constraints of plot or of narrative construct, luxuriates in a sort of scholarly sharing. It is writing that could not possibly be other without damaging itself—if only slightly—answering the question of what exactly the purpose of writing is in the time of filmmaking. I feel lifted up by this book. Of course, it is easy to fall in love with a philosopher who expands your mind and makes you feel individually seen and spoken to. Billy-Ray Belcourt is such a philosopher.