All Books

Including poetry projects, a chapbook and incidental poems previously published in magazines and by small presses, is a door makes use of the poem’s ability for “suddenness” to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening—writing that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem-solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation and documentary—in short, poetry as practice.
Part one, “Isadora Blue,” is grounded in the author’s encounter with the smashed and broken doors along the hurricane-devastated waterfront of Telchac Puerto, a small village on the north coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. It resonates throughout the other three sections of the book, with its attention to hybridity and “between-ness”—a poetic investigation of racialized otherness—and the composition of “citizen” and “foreigner” through history and language.

Part two of this series of poems, “Ethnogy Journal,” written during a trip to Thailand and Laos in 1999, hinges around aspects of “tourist” and “native.” Here the poems play in the interstices of spectacle, food and social sightseeing.

Much of this poetry is framed by Wah’s acute sense of the marginalized non-urban local “place” and coloured by his attempt to articulate senses of otherness and resistance, or writing the “public self,” particularly in the book’s third section, “Discount Me In”—a series of sixteen poems from his discursive poetic essay “Count Me In.”

The fourth section, “Hinges,” is tinted with portraits of the social subject mired in a diasporic mix, a metanarrative trope in Fred Wah’s work that began with Breathin’ My Name With a Sigh.

Characteristically playful and compositionally musical, this is poetry that watches both sides of the doorway: unsettled, unpredictable, closed and open. Sometimes the door swings and can be kicked. Sometimes it’s simply missing. Sometimes it’s a sliding door.

A challenging exploration of mental illness and disability from Governor General’s Award winner Jacob Scheier.

Is This Scary? digs deep into internal landscapes of suffering, including depression and anxiety, chronic physical ailment, and rare neurological malady. With its many eccentric songs and odes to medications and medical procedures, this book is full of both levity and unapologetic lament. Pushing back against societal stigma, Is This Scary? unflinchingly addresses experiences of psychiatric institutionalization and suicidality, without either romanticizing or pathologizing them. Scheier rejects much of the mainstream cultural views of mental illness, subverting the biochemical model by emphasizing the radical subjectivity of mental suffering. While the poems render the difficulty of communicating pain to others, they defiantly celebrate its expression and evocation through visceral lyricism.

Scheier also challenges our culture’s desire to be inspired by stories of “triumphing” over illness and disability. Nothing is overcome here, the journey from illness to wellness is one of narrative and aesthetic disruption. The perpetually incomplete search for self and home is ultimately at the heart of this book: along with being a person with disabilities, the poet-speaker identifies as a Diaspora-Jew, engaging exile as a chronic state of being that isn’t intended to be resolved, but rather explored, expressed, and honored.

Ode to Prednisone

Herr Pill! You murder sleep.
Eugenicist Cortisol, re-make me—
ox-strong, moon-faced, onioned-skin.
Hugs are dangerous.
Performance-enhancing drug for poets—
you triple feelings. Elegies for the late train & spilled milk.
Anxiety is Everything.
Threatened by the light that brightens the dark.
Dread tolerates Ativan.
Faustian Chemical, you resurrect myths
like Lazarus. He was never the same.
Charon-ian Steroid,
I’ve been to that shore the dead clamour for.