Books that are like a dog with a bone. Books that are like kids turned loose on a pile of lego. Books that are like hard-boiled detectives offered a seemingly easy payday. Other than very questionable similes, what do these three examples have in common? Compulsion. The need to work through a problem, search out the limits of the circumstance’s possibilities, and investigate an opportunity to—and even beyond—a reasonable limit.
I like books that investigate, work through, and search out the limits of a task, an idea, or a theme. Books that seem to start with a simple “What if…?” premise and then proceed to work through that premise over and over, from every possible angle—and then proceed to work through that premise from every impossible angle. The Loom tries to do this with fatherhood and my love for my two sons. I was well into my forties when my eldest arrived, and it was an experience that was, alongside the expected feelings of love and tiredness, productively disruptive. When my youngest came along three years later, my life was happily and haplessly bowled over again. What is the experience of parenting, of learning and relearning a completely new type of love that nothing prepared me for? The Loom is my attempt to investigate that experience.
I like books that investigate, work through, and search out the limits of a task, an idea, or a theme. Books that seem to start with a simple “What if…?” premise and then proceed to work through that premise over and over, from every possible angle—and then proceed to work through that premise from every impossible angle.
I like to think of The Loom (and all the books on this list) as an example of “meditative investigations.” But that’s a lousy term. Instead, something like “poetry that uses play to extend thinking beyond expected norms” seems a bit more accurate, but that’s even lousier. So maybe “investigative play” is good enough. Regardless of the term, these books take their self-appointed tasks to spectacular results.
What could a poem over a millennium old have to tell us today? In Markotic’s reworking, an awful lot. Hilariously contemporary, linguistically sexy, and profoundly transformative, After Beowulf shows us what can happen when a masterful poet decides to take on the English language and force it to live on the razor’s edge in order to tell English’s oldest epic. I can’t do the book justice by describing it, so just read it and let Markotic carry you away into a type of poetry you didn’t know was possible.
Resuscitating the (somewhat) lost practice of typewriter visual poetry, Spinosa takes the reader on a spectacular tour through the history of the genre—all the while working through the gender politics of twentieth century avant-garde writing. Why weren’t women working in the field of concrete poetry? Spinosa seems to ask, only to provide answer after uncomfortable answer that they were, only to be erased from the histories and anthologies of the movement. Reworking (Spinosa refers to her poems as “visual glosas”) visual poems by female and male practitioners, she reimagines what typewriter concrete can be in the twenty-first century.
mclennan focuses on the quotidian, specifically the day-to-day patterns of family life with young daughters. “Smaller” refers to the restrictions and limitations of parenting, to the careful attention to minute details that the poems offer, and to the compact size of the poems on the page. Part of the joy of the book is reading just how expansive mclennan manages to be, writing on everything from his house and household to Emily Dickinson’s hair. This was, I think—it’s hard to keep track—mclennan’s 25th book of poetry, and I’d argue it’s his best.
How did settler colonialism write itself to justify itself, and how can someone intervene in that long, seemingly impenetrable narrative? Abel brilliantly answers both questions by putting nearly one hundred public domain early twentieth-century Western novels through a series of searches, letting CTRL-F seek out the appearances of keywords (i.e., “uninhabited,” “territory,” “treaty,”) loaded with racial and colonial assumptions and biases. The result is a book that forces settlers to face the violent racism of their history while also asserting the ongoing power of Indigenous agency.
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Leavings, by Kate Siklosi
In possibly the single-most revelatory book I’ve read in decades, Siklosi manages to investigate the interplay between inherited texts, visual poetry, and the natural environment. She accomplishes this by cutting up and repurposing documents like the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and then using Letraset technology (good old-fashioned dry-transfer printing) to write the remixed words directly onto, among other things, maple leaves, flower petals, birchbark, and—my personal favourite—eggshells. The resulting poems (printed in rich full colour) reimagine the entire practice of nature writing, concrete poetry, and authorship. The results are as inspiring as they are inspired.
Examining the ubiquitous nature of plastic in contemporary life, Dickinson structures The Polymers around chemical structures in order to examine everything from Sidney Crosby’s golden goal in the 2010 Olympics to the ongoing problems of mercury poisoning in Grassy Narrows. The book imagines how language is an example of plasticity at the same time that it thinks of plastics as the physical language of our era. It’s a spectacular melding of scientific and linguistic experimentation.
A book about writing that is as exciting, challenging, and beautiful as any other book I’ve read, The Blue Clerk imagines a dialogue between a poet and her audience—if the audience is thought of as the reader, the editor, the poet’s own imagination, and language. In a series of prose poems that are essays (or small essays that are prose poems?), Brand meditates on what can be said, what cannot be said, and where and how the line between those two states exists, shifts, and is policed. My description makes it sound theoretical and dull, but Brand’s magic is that these contemplations are beautiful musings on the purpose and practice of art in a society.
A bifurcated book that is unified in a strangely perfect way, Frost & Pollen starts with “Bloom & Martyr,” a series of eco-poems that meditate on beauty, desire, and the natural world. The language is as lush as the most-decadent garden, and each poem is like a beautiful petal from a spectacular bloom. The second-half of the book is “Foliage,” a retelling of fourteenth-century Arthurian poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” that crackles with sexual tension and a recasting of the Green Knight as an eco-warrior defending the natural world. What is language teamed up with the natural world to tell us nature’s story? I think it would look a lot like Hajnoczky’s work.
What are the thought processes of baseball? Not thinking about baseball, but rather what does being at a baseball game allow and prompt one to think—that’s the concept behind Cain’s linguistically acrobatic book. Allowing himself to write each of the book’s poems only between the innings of his son’s baseball games, Cain bunts, hammers, steals, and throws language through so many twists, puns, and turns that the resulting poems function as spectacular diamonds of playful mindgames.
I almost left this book off the list because it’s so well-known in Canadian (and worldwide) poetry circles—but it’s too good and too important not to mention. Using the written decision of the eighteenth-century legal case surrounding the horrific Zong massacre as a “word store,” Philip places the law, reason, and language itself under scrutiny to examine the ongoing roles that slavery, white supremacy, linguistic bias play in racist attitudes and actions across the centuries. The poetry is intentionally difficult, often moving past understanding, in order to force the reader to experience something that, in a small way, approximates the confusion and terror of the Middle Passage and its legacy today.
Andy Weaver led a life of quiet contemplation before becoming a father at the age of 42. Within three years he had two sons; two small, relentless disruptions to an existence which had, for a very long time, been self-sustaining and tranquil.
The Loom is a book about love. It is a book about frustration, confusion, crying, and being sticky. It is a book about doubt, unreadiness, fear, sleeplessness, and pressure. It is a book about parenthood. But mostly, it’s a book about love.
Andy Weaver presents a series of lyric poems which stand on their own yet weave together to create a complete whole, like childhood days. He shares the beauty of parenthood, and it’s unexpected frustrations, and the surreality of an experience that is at once deeply universal and completely personal. With self-awareness and a deep vein of humour, he translates the total submission to unconditional love the parenthood demands.
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