Time is a Mother
By Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)
Reviewed by Keith Garebian
From his debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and his autobiographical epistolary novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, to his new poetry collection, Time Is a Mother, Ocean Vuong exemplifies startling, ecstatic ways of full-bodied writing. Vuong continues to explore his interests in family, memory, war, grief, and trauma—his expressions of pain connecting him to other suffering victims in a misbegotten world. Everything he writes (haibun, cinematic montage, prose poem, dream, fantasy, anaphora, ekphrastic, fragment, etc.) comes from within, his body radiating what the mind thinks in powerful images. But his body is strongly shadowed by that of his beloved mother, Le Kim Hong (who at times goes by Rose in the text because her name means rose or pink in Vietnamese), who died of breast cancer at the age of 51 in 2019, a few months before the COVID pandemic wreaked its own massive devastation across the globe. “The most beautiful part / of your body is wherever / your mother’s shadow falls,” he writes in Night Sky, a sentiment extended in Time Is a Mother by the “dry outline” of his mother in winter when they created a snow angel together. Grievously wounded by her death, he seeks to make her absence a vital paradoxical presence through language. Like the taxidermy buck mounted over a soda machine near the restrooms at a rest stop in Virginia that shook Rose because it “embodied a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves,” her passing never brings closure in any sense to his life. Indeed, her spirit is like light keeping its own shadow “by swallowing it”—an image I have taken from “Into the Breach,” a poem from Night Sky about a totally different subject.
In Vuong’s case, the body is memory defined by language embedded within or through it. Rose was evidently illiterate, and she never read any of her son’s published writing, yet her memory is preserved through her son’s brilliant lyricism. As Vuong tried to teach her the English alphabet, he noticed a strand of hair “lifting from her face … how it fell / onto the page—& lived / with no sound. Like a word. / I still hear it.” (“The Gift,” Night Sky). Vuong is no naïf. As Time Is a Mother shows, language cannot undo anyone’s death, no matter how well the poet rewinds time (“Kunstlerroman”) or attempts to free it from an existential cage built around the heart, as when he writes of an uncle’s suicide (“Beautiful Short Loser”). But language, especially in Vuong’s supple repertoire, can create an illusion of presence. The list poem “Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker,” is a record of his mother’s purchases while battling cancer, and the poem moves with bare banal language to herald mortal doom concisely and elliptically. The summative, penultimate poem, “Dear Rose,” yearns for a new beginning for himself and his mother, after their combined years of humiliation, indignity, and suffering: “Let me begin again now / that you’re gone Ma / if you’re reading this then you survived / your life into this one … if you’re reading this then / I survived my life into yours.”
Time Is a Mother reveals Vuong’s struggles with addiction, American disorders, and the poet’s deep grief over his mother’s death. “How you say what you mean changes what you say,” he proclaims in “Not Even,” cognizant that metaphors express what we see while revealing who we are. Metaphors abound, of course, channelled through language that refuses the stanza, refuses even normal punctuation and orthodox grammar, with line breaks effecting dramatically staccato rhythms: “Wind / in the branches. He watched me with kerosene / -blue eyes … I was a boy— / which meant I was a murderer / of my childhood. & like all murderers, my god / was stillness” (“Bull”). Surprise and shock, both elements of a tense psyche, are registered and underlined by violent images—satirically, in the toxic masculinity of “Knock ’em dead, big guy. Go in there / guns blazing, buddy. You crushed / at the show. No, it was a blowout. No, / a massacre. Total overkill” (“Old Glory”) or in a highly charged revelation of queer identity in “When the flood comes / I’ll raise my hand so they know / who to shoot. The sky flashes. The sea / yearns. I myself / am hell” (“The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica”).
But language is rhetoric, and as Vuong learned from his seven-year-old cousin Sara, what is the point of caring about it if we cannot remake ourselves, despite our vulnerabilities and anomalies? “Dear Sara” encapsulates the rhetorical question in the form of the little girl’s startling metaphor: “What’s the point of writing if you’re just gonna force a bunch of ants to cross a white desert?” The question doesn’t, can’t, get a definitive answer, but Time Is a Mother boldly and bravely surmounts history’s rubble by making a web that, when touched almost anywhere, trembles with authentically compassionate feeling. It is a haunting elegy in which poetry, as guardian both tender and tough, can help us survive our griefs and misgivings.
Nowadays and Lonelier
By Carmella Gray-Cosgrove (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Reviewed by Vange Holtz-Schramek
Carmella Gray-Cosgrove’s first collection of short stories, Nowadays and Lonelier, offers a unique window into Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a Turtle Island locale infamous for crime, drug use, and poverty. Turning away from this neighbourhood’s reputation in national media, many of Gray-Cosgrove’s narratives centre the experience of childhood and young adulthood in co-operative housing projects in V6A, microcosmic worlds of violence, racism, substance abuse, and burgeoning sexuality and identity. Primarily, they centre on integral kinship bonds beyond bloodlines, like when a friend’s mother, Barbara, takes the narrator under her wing in the story “Whippits”: “She said [things] straight to me. Didn’t pretend I was a kid, didn’t pretend I didn’t know things.” The narrator gets lost in “how good it felt to be told about things someone thought I might need to hear” (p. 164).
When you just live in a place, you follow cracks in the pavement while you begin to comprehend commerce: Barbies for sale, laid out on garbage bags or sweaters on East Hastings, blonde hairballs dotting the quilt of the sidewalk. While not enclosed in cellophane boxes within stores in the brick-and-mortar Army & Navy sense, the dolls and their tender hot-dog limbs are traded for something necessary to someone. We had some. I had thought they had come from Toys “R” Us, but maybe they had crawled their way over from those makeshift shelves.¹
One of this collection’s eminent strengths is the author’s pitch-perfect tone in describing emotionally transformative events in human life in unsentimental yet deeply resonant prose. In “Today Is the Day,” the young protagonist Teeny becomes pregnant by her abusive partner. She sees a doctor who, simply, “hands her a list of support services for women in abusive relationships. It’s a handwritten list that has been photocopied so many times it’s barely legible” (p. 97).
Those whom you know point out which tar-black sedans belong to the lawyers who idle, snorting lines on their way into work in some gleaming Gastown reno, and which are undercover cop cars. “Wear an oversized coat if you can wrangle one, and keep your hands outside your pockets,” were credos we clung to.
Gray-Cosgrove’s fictive worlds are held together through affective attachments between characters. The beauty and purpose of these Bildungsroman tales necessitates such strong bonds between folks and their (often) chosen families. And yet, such relationships and their narratives of survival are rendered without mawkishness or pathos. They are, simply, how people survive, the facts of the matter. People in Gray-Cosgrove’s adolescent world of Eastside co-ops hold on to each other and find beauty together—keeping watch over each other like “the searchlight from Playland that scans the city on summer nights” (p. 57).
Later, it was more about staying up until the navy turned to periwinkle to photograph the spiderweb network of power lines in the sea-level alleys off Pender that stretched to a world beyond my imaginative limits. If only I could monkey-bar along those sagging power lines and bound across the harbour … He would point the straw of his Slurpee at me so I could suck blue syrup as I aimed my lens up, the frayed edges of my fingerless gloves reeking of weed.
As someone with lived experiences in this neighbourhood, I appreciate the stripped-down, emotional clarity applied to its locales and inhabitants. As someone who just lived here, without spectacle, I self-reflexively engage with Nowadays and Lonelier as a cultural artifact from an often-unrepresented position in Turtle Island urban Anglophone literature: the unsentimental girl or young woman. Gray-Cosgrove’s work is thus indebted to a privileged few literary forebears, such as Eden Robinson, Heather O’Neill, Chelene Knight, and Lisa Moore.
1 Reading Gray-Cosgrove’s evocative stories elicited my own past(s) from the Downtown Eastside. I share them throughout this review in block italics.
29 leads to love
By Salimah Valiani (Inanna Publications)
Reviewed by Irene Marques
Salimah Valiani’s 29 leads to love is characterized by dazzling and graceful imagery that reaches the reader on a multitude of levels, awakening our intelligences to make us see the many dimensions of the realties the poet exposes. The collection explores the concept of love in a heterogeneous, powerful, and moving manner, calling our attention to collective well-being and the future of our planet. The exploitation of the physical world and humans by humans constitutes the principal preoccupation of the book and is presented as the impediment to an existence of maturity and realization. The collection asks us to build new social systems based on revised epistemological paradigms that will pave the way to a more realized, advanced world and personhood. As the title implies, the poems lead (guide) us to alternative ways of seeing, understanding, and doing, demanding that we extend our beingness. This change, this extended beingness, is love.
To love is to strive to know more because when we know more, we do better. As Valiani explained to me in an email exchange in June of 2022, “The poems are a non-intellectual way to encourage thinking and feeling about relationality, where everyone plays a part, and being deliberate about how we enact the part.”
Respect for the “non-human other” or for one’s physical body is at the forefront of the book’s ethos and is intrinsically tied to the idea of love that runs through the collection. The physical, in its diverse manifestations (the river, the plants, the sky, the rocks, the city, the very human body) is presented as the sacred house we inhabit and a source of great knowledge, wisdom, joy, and affiliation with the “other.” It is the medium that permits us to attain spiritual enlightenment and see the connections between self and other—other human and other non-human. We learn through the body, through the senses, realizing how we are like other bodies.
To love is to “hold,” a verb used often throughout the collection, implying that one must care for an “other” who needs our attention, our help, our embrace—an “other” who is part of us. This “holding” entails touching, physicality, materiality, pointing again to the importance of the body-material throughout the collection. This body-material also entails the creation of healthy social institutions, a new politics of living that can—if built intelligently, with compassion and the well-being of the collectivity in mind—“hold (take care of) us,” rather than destroy, exploit us. We hold one another and the world by designing thoughtful, inclusive institutions and non-predatory economic and social systems. Without the force of the us working together to remake our world, there is no healthy collectivity possible. This is love.
The final poem of the collection, “To do it differently (ii) or, On love (xxix),” picks up on these ideas about what we must do differently to regenerate our world. This poem begins with a statement from a woman of Abya Yala, a region in the Darién Gap whose name means “land in its full maturity” or “land of vital blood” in the Guna Indigenous language: “We don’t know how to die. When we learn to die, we will learn to live and our war will end.” The statement emphasizes that it is necessary to kill old ways of living and learn new ways of building a more egalitarian world. Valiani explains that in this poem she attempts to “imagine and magnify a feminist ethic of care to a world scale, going far beyond women or caregivers or those in need of care.” This is love.
To love is also to give without expecting anything in return. And pain and suffering are displayed as the road to greater love, because when our own heart is broken, there is enough of it to go around—to do good to others, that is, so that their suffering can be minimized—as the poem “On love (xi)” poignantly reminds us:
how many times can your heart be broken
once
after that
the pieces
are enough
to go around (p. 43)
This is love in action (going around). Let’s love then, in all the endless ways required of all of us, so that we can inhabit the Abya Yala—“a land in its full maturity, a land of vital blood,” the one Great Love produced out of all our love. Our beingness demands it.
Cut To Fortress
By Tawahum Bige (Nightwood Editions)
Reviewed by Kevin Spenst
Poet, performer, and activist Tawahum Bige’s debut collection of poetry, Cut to Fortress, is a fireball of a book that dazzlingly redefines culture, place, and personhood out loud. As a spoken word performer and “page poet,” Bige is adept at bringing words on the page to life. The individual poems stand on their own but are also subtly linked to one another in order to generate one of the central transformations of the book, a ball of energy instanced most vividly in the poem “Transformer”: “our jobs / generate / our demise / building // one transformer / at a time.” In this eco-poem about the effects of Site C’s hydroelectric dam, four stanzas spread out on the page examine how the promise of pipelines undermines the environment and ultimately any basis for a culture.
The loveliness of this book is in the turning of the page to the following poem where “transformer” is redefined in Indigenous terms as figures who are “world-building: / star-enchanted change,” those spirits who are responsible for transformation that are more important than water to electricity for an overall system of greed. The next poem, “How the Elders Educate,” provides the basis for knowledge and culture: “stories oral / lived / relived.” Every poem in the collection has its strengths in voice, imagery, and passion, but I love this weaving of ideas that creates these longer patterns.
The redefinition of place is centred in the poem “Storm Call,” where an oil terminal is “locked up like a castle,” a medieval comparison where the oil terminal guards view themselves as knights. Bige counters the backwardness of this worldview by calling for an “ancient new paradigm,” invoking the wisdom of the past as we imagine our way together into a better future. A list of allies is presented and suddenly the land, until now weighted down in colonialist fantasy, is reenvisioned as both a place for providing food and a sacred spot where there are “fire keepers and time travelers / here — to call / lightning / down from a / clear blue sky.” In another poem, “Too Abstract,” a poem is criticized in a workshop for lacking concreteness, but the speaker counters with the idea of concrete itself as a material extracted from the earth. The speaker also points out that the abstract word under question, colonization, “is a two-man saw: / a signed-in-blood, written-in-English / contract atop a forest cut to stumps / called fortress.” The stronghold of a fortress is redefined by the trees it has displaced in a way that echoes the earlier examination of concrete.
Absence is another element that forms and shapes much of Cut to Fortress. In “how the elders educate,” one stanza is presented as an arc where “learned martyrs in the community / set the bar sky high / on their shoulders.” The white space of the page represents those who are part of the resistance against colonial practices. Elsewhere, in the poem entitled “Cartridge Discharges,” Colten Boushie is not named, but the defence of Boushie’s killer rests like hang fire in the title. This poem ends with the line “’til its tips touch cloud and scorch,” which enacts the oral potential of the page with the spoken version of “until.” That technique is used throughout the book, as is this intense alliteration, another feature of orality that lifts the voice off the page in its remembrance of those who have been taken.
The cover of Cut to Fortress bears the name “Tawahum Bige,” but the last poem in the collection outlines the process of a person’s transformation. The work of acknowledging resemblance and the cosmic potential in everyone (“What universes do you witness/ in us? / in me?”) is contrasted with the specificity of the speaker, who writes: “This is the flip side to the / pit dug deep inside of me / It holds massive volumes / worth living for.” The poem abounds in acts of redefinition, the speaker shifting in their self-identification from “I am asteroid collision,” a nod to a video game referenced elsewhere to “I am starry skies.” The final lines rename the author of the book: “Tawahum nitisîyihkâson / sezí Tawahum súlye // My name is North Star.”
Cut to Fortress is an important book of poetry about reimagining the world with its standard and stilted definitions. It’s a beautiful book rooted in insight: “We think we need a new way / when the secrets are hidden / in the old ways.”
