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4.43 AVERAGE
4.43 AVERAGE
reflective
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
challenging
reflective
sad
fast-paced
challenging
reflective
tense
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
I rarely read full poetry collections because it's a form I can struggle with as a reader. This book has so many layers, and the poems dive deep into theory and emotion. It's the sort of book that I would likely understand better if I could talk it through with other readers or in an academic setting to catch some of the allusions that I know I'm missing. But there are also some poems that I really loved, even without necessarily having the broader context, and I'm glad I read the whole book. I think my favorite may have been Cree Girl Blows Up The Necropolis Of Ottawa, but The Terrible Beauty of the Reserve was a close second.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
challenging
reflective
fast-paced
A country is how men hunt in the dark. A man I love but don’t trust kisses me the way a soldier might press his face into the soil of his old country.
Behind the wheel of a car without headlights, the night is a lukewarm mouth we sing into.
In every account of my adolescence, I hurled myself at a prison so that moonlight could tiptoe inside — the captive jutted out of me like music!
a mattress covered in moss soft as September
A creature of habit, I dip my feet into the dirt of yet another man’s chest.
Sometimes a body is that which happens to you.
If I could uninvent the words “priest” and “prayer,” then the dead could come back from the dead for at least a chance at revenge.
A white boyfriend of mine wanted to be less beholden to the clouds. I told him we were all at mercy of the sky, for better or worse.
My hobbies include: not dying, obsessively apologizing to the moon for all that she has to witness, and slow dancing to the tune of “Heaven” by Bryan Adams with men who refuse to give in to the life-changing magic of vulnerability.
I instill the place between that world and ours with flammable meaning / I make a wildfire out of it
I oscillate between Grindr and an essay about Toronto’s Grindr serial killer. This is a reference to Foucault.
1. Top me, but ontologically.
All this talk of how poetry brings us closer to language, but what if it’s already left? Found a gentler species? Warner mouths?
Prove to me that he who despises the world isn’t also transfixed by it.
Behind the wheel of a car without headlights, the night is a lukewarm mouth we sing into.
In every account of my adolescence, I hurled myself at a prison so that moonlight could tiptoe inside — the captive jutted out of me like music!
a mattress covered in moss soft as September
A creature of habit, I dip my feet into the dirt of yet another man’s chest.
Sometimes a body is that which happens to you.
If I could uninvent the words “priest” and “prayer,” then the dead could come back from the dead for at least a chance at revenge.
A white boyfriend of mine wanted to be less beholden to the clouds. I told him we were all at mercy of the sky, for better or worse.
My hobbies include: not dying, obsessively apologizing to the moon for all that she has to witness, and slow dancing to the tune of “Heaven” by Bryan Adams with men who refuse to give in to the life-changing magic of vulnerability.
I instill the place between that world and ours with flammable meaning / I make a wildfire out of it
I oscillate between Grindr and an essay about Toronto’s Grindr serial killer. This is a reference to Foucault.
1. Top me, but ontologically.
All this talk of how poetry brings us closer to language, but what if it’s already left? Found a gentler species? Warner mouths?
Prove to me that he who despises the world isn’t also transfixed by it.
emotional
reflective