Poetry Curious? New to Poetry? Check out these books.

Recently while waiting at the train station for my weekly commute from Toronto to London, I was engaged in a friendly chit-chat with a woman who might best be described as a “talker”… She told me all the train times from London to Toronto. She listed every snack they sold on the train. She described the boarding procedure in elaborate detail. When she finally asked me what I did, and I told her I was a writer, she got an excited look in her eye and said, “For newspapers?” But when I said a little sheepishly, “No, I’m a poet,” my answer took her so off guard that she looked at me sideways and didn’t ask another thing.As someone who teaches writers new to poetry, I’m well aware that poetry can make people feel uncomfortable and at times even alienated. For some, the idea of reading poetry is akin to going to the dentist or eating lima beans. So it’s not surprising that it stopped my otherwise chatty train station companion from talking as abruptly as if she had hit a brick wall.I wasn’t always a fan either. Having to recite “In Flanders Fields” in elementary school didn’t help and neither did the sonnet writing in Grade 12 English. Even though I was interested in literature and ended up majoring in it in university, I thought poetry was rigid and impenetrable, and because I thought I didn’t understand it and was supposed to, it made me feel dumb. In my second year of university, I was enrolled in my first poetry writing class, and I wanted to read contemporary poetry even though it felt intimidating and I didn’t know where to start. This was pre-internet time, and there were no online journals to look up in the comfort of my home. There were three places to find poetry: bookstores, the library, and magazine stores. So I went to all of these places and just started reading books, journals, and chapbooks. Most of it, I skimmed over; most of it, I thought was boring; most of it, I didn’t “get”.But in my searching, which felt like all haystack and no needle, I came across a book by Douglas Burnet Smith called The Knife Thrower’s Partner (Wolsak and Wynn, 1989). This collection of linked poems is narrated from the point of view of a knife thrower’s partner while they are on the road performing in small towns. Over the course of the narrative, the speaker reflects on her childhood and her fraught relationship with the knife thrower and contemplates leaving him but doesn’t quite know how. The collection is sparse, novelistic, and highly imagistic. I opened the book to its first page and found these lines:As I read this poem, I couldn’t move. I got shivers. I thought to myself finally there is poetry for me, and if this exists, then there must be more. And there was—during that time I discovered Julie Bruck, Evelyn Lau, Michael Turner, Marilyn Dumont, and others. I just needed to get over being intimidated in order to begin to figure out what I liked and didn’t like.The Knife Thrower’s Partner opened up the world of poetry for me. So in the spirit of guiding poetry-curious readers to poetry, I’ve complied a list of six contemporary Canadian poetry books published between 2007 and 2015 for those who are interested but who might not know where to start. But don’t worry—I’m not going to tell why you should read poetry or how great poetry is for your soul. Poems are not vegetables or medicine, and while they may be a fine way to pass the time for some, they are not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea.  I’ve chosen these works not because they are easy. They are not. These are poems that require close attention and in some cases rereading, and they don’t provide quick interpretations or one way of looking at their subjects. But I’ve chosen them because I think readers new to poetry may be surprised by what they find and because each book broadens the idea of what a poem is or can be—especially if you’re not used to reading poetry.

When I first picked up Souvankham Thammavongsa’s book Found (Pedlar Press, 2007), I was immediately struck by the minimal design of the cover, which consists of a single marking. In 1978 Thammavongsa’s parents lived in building #48, Nong Khai, Thailand, a Lao refugee camp where she was born. Her father kept a scrapbook during this time, which Thammavongsa uses as her source text. She writes: “He threw it out and when he did, I took it and found this.” The poems in Found consist of Thammavongsa’s observations of her father’s “doodles, addresses, postage stamps, maps, measurements” from the precise and minimal descriptions of his handwriting to “The exact address of / the International Rescue Committee.” The result is a haunting portrait, which reads a little like a documentary poem, of a daughter piecing together her family’s history, learning almost as much from what she doesn’t find as what she does. Thammavongsa’s other two award-winning books are also worth checking out—Small Arguments (Pedlar Press, 2003), which won the ReLit Prize, and Light (Pedlar Press, 2013), which won the Trillium Award in 2014.

Update (Invisible Publishing/Snare Books, 2010) by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler is a collection of poetry generated by a website the authors developed that randomly mashes up the names of dead poets garnered from Wikipedia with status updates from their Facebook friends. For such a seemingly simple concept, Update is, in fact, a multi-faceted work that examines among other things surveillance, voyeurism, consent, copyright, the canon, social networking, and the role of the author in the creation of a literary work. The juxtaposition of the names of dead poets alongside contemporary status updates produces harrowing and hilarious results such as “Paul Celan is watching history unfold. Paul Celan is watching history unfold” (19) or “… Bertolt Brecht is wondering if his kitty would like a sister. Bertolt Brecht finished tiling at 2:30 AM and has become a grout grouch” (15) or “… Antonin Artaud thinks that dreary Sundays require magical stories” (11). Although the site is no longer online, Update gives us a snapshot of the experience of this poetry generating website in book form.

In his stunning second collection Personals (Freehand Books, 2012), shortlisted for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award, Ian Williams draws inspiration from personal ads on Craigslist to create a playful, although often painful, series of poems. Williams experiments not only with poetic forms but also with voice. Here you’ll find sonnets, ghazals, fugues, and mock-heroic couplets that depict all the ways we are lonely in the contemporary age. Technology certainly plays a role in our inability to connect with one another and sometimes our lives just don’t live up to what we’ve been told to expect as is the case for the speaker in “The Romance Novel” who comes to the conclusion that if “mr_right” is real       Even though these characters often fail to get what they want—whether it’s a couple’s desire for a child, a UFC fan looking for a drinking buddy, or a women wondering “where her man is, where all the men are” (24)—not all hope is lost because these are characters who, despite all odds, are still trying.

Have you ever had the experience of expecting to take a sip of one type of beverage, like milk, and it turns out to be another, like orange juice or water? Maybe someone played a trick on you or maybe you picked up the wrong glass? In any case, it is not an unpleasant experience, but it certainly has an unusual effect on the senses. This is as close as I can get to describing what it’s like to read Marie-Ève Comtois’s second book of poetry, My Planet of Kites (Mansfield Press, 2015, translated by Stuart Ross and Michelle Winters). The lines on the first page “I feel like a voyage myself. I have leukemia without my suitcase” (7) give you some indication of what you are in for with these strange and beautiful prose poems. My Planet of Kites is an image-rich collection composed of a fragmentary interior monologue whose speaker moves frequently between laughter and despair—often in the same line: “Here the roses are bathing. Open your joy, stay for a bit, I can find in your sorrow a rhythm. Tralalalalalala Tuesday.” (37). In these pleasantly absurd but deeply felt, deeply personal poems, Comtois employs a series of misdirections—non-sequiturs, substitutions, and paradoxical statements. And she juxtaposes sensory language in such a way that each line reads like a tiny explosion on the page: “Pour me a glass of hot country, Montreal is freezing” (9).The experience of poetry is not all that different from the experience of working on a crossword puzzle. Mulling over the words and trying to figure out what the poet is communicating is part of the delight. I wish someone had told me back when I started reading poetry that it’s okay be confused or disoriented and that there isn’t just one interpretation. Poetry isn’t just one thing—if you don’t like one type of poetry, you might just like another.So if all the clambering about Poetry Month has you even a little bit curious about poetry—then consider checking out these books.* * *Kathryn Mockler is a writer, poet, and screenwriter. She is the author of the poetry books The Purpose Pitch (Mansfield Press, “a stuart ross book,” Spring 2015), The Saddest Place on Earth (DC Books, 2012), and Onion Man (Tightrope Books, 2011). Her writing has been published in Found Press, Geist, This Magazine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Currently, she is the Toronto editor of Joyland: a hub for short fiction and the publisher of the online literary and arts journal The Rusty Toque.

Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood Editions, 2006), a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and Elizabeth Bachinsky’s second collection of poetry, perfectly captures coming of age in small-town Canada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Bachinsky’s characters are often young women who contradict cliché notions of how they are expected to feel about their bodies and sex. In these poems you’ll find young women desiring men, young women desiring women, young women desiring a life outside of their own—even if they don’t get it—even if they “marry within a ten-mile radius of their hometown (57) or grow up to “sell beautiful things” (13) they will not be able to afford. But there’s tragedy here too: from B&E’s, broken condoms, and pregnancy scares to a girl’s murder and a boy’s disappearance. And almost all of this is presented in traditional poetic form—sonnets, villanelles, even a glosa after P.K. Page’s poem “Outcasts”. Home of Sudden Service is an impressive collection portraying the fragile moments between adolescence and adulthood where everything and nothing seems possible.

Jonathan Ball brings French surrealist Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty to poetry in his nightmarish but often humorous collection of prose poems, Clockfire (Coach House Books, 2010). A critic of the artifice of the theatre, Artaud sought to create works that provoked audiences and performers to realize their primal human instincts that he felt society had repressed. In Clockfire, Ball applies Artaud’s theories to his series of poems which read like summaries or stage directions for plays that would be “impossible to produce” where audience and performers antagonize one another in an endless tug of war. Shock, awe, fear, stasis, repetition, hopelessness, and confusion are hallmarks of Ball’s poems. While many of these scenarios are disturbing and involve such performances as setting the theatre on fire, throat slitting, bloodletting, and endless and futile repetitions—the violence we find here is not frivolous or gratuitous but rather it is pointed. The horrors that unfold on the page, which may be impossible to produce as plays, are often not all that far off from the nightmare of our living reality—from the paradox of the so-called human condition to the pain and suffering we inflict on ourselves and others.

Update (Invisible Publishing/Snare Books, 2010) by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler is a collection of poetry generated by a website the authors developed that randomly mashes up the names of dead poets garnered from Wikipedia with status updates from their Facebook friends. For such a seemingly simple concept, Update is, in fact, a multi-faceted work that examines among other things surveillance, voyeurism, consent, copyright, the canon, social networking, and the role of the author in the creation of a literary work. The juxtaposition of the names of dead poets alongside contemporary status updates produces harrowing and hilarious results such as “Paul Celan is watching history unfold. Paul Celan is watching history unfold” (19) or “… Bertolt Brecht is wondering if his kitty would like a sister. Bertolt Brecht finished tiling at 2:30 AM and has become a grout grouch” (15) or “… Antonin Artaud thinks that dreary Sundays require magical stories” (11). Although the site is no longer online, Update gives us a snapshot of the experience of this poetry generating website in book form.

In his stunning second collection Personals (Freehand Books, 2012), shortlisted for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award, Ian Williams draws inspiration from personal ads on Craigslist to create a playful, although often painful, series of poems. Williams experiments not only with poetic forms but also with voice. Here you’ll find sonnets, ghazals, fugues, and mock-heroic couplets that depict all the ways we are lonely in the contemporary age. Technology certainly plays a role in our inability to connect with one another and sometimes our lives just don’t live up to what we’ve been told to expect as is the case for the speaker in “The Romance Novel” who comes to the conclusion that if “mr_right” is real       Even though these characters often fail to get what they want—whether it’s a couple’s desire for a child, a UFC fan looking for a drinking buddy, or a women wondering “where her man is, where all the men are” (24)—not all hope is lost because these are characters who, despite all odds, are still trying.

Have you ever had the experience of expecting to take a sip of one type of beverage, like milk, and it turns out to be another, like orange juice or water? Maybe someone played a trick on you or maybe you picked up the wrong glass? In any case, it is not an unpleasant experience, but it certainly has an unusual effect on the senses. This is as close as I can get to describing what it’s like to read Marie-Ève Comtois’s second book of poetry, My Planet of Kites (Mansfield Press, 2015, translated by Stuart Ross and Michelle Winters). The lines on the first page “I feel like a voyage myself. I have leukemia without my suitcase” (7) give you some indication of what you are in for with these strange and beautiful prose poems. My Planet of Kites is an image-rich collection composed of a fragmentary interior monologue whose speaker moves frequently between laughter and despair—often in the same line: “Here the roses are bathing. Open your joy, stay for a bit, I can find in your sorrow a rhythm. Tralalalalalala Tuesday.” (37). In these pleasantly absurd but deeply felt, deeply personal poems, Comtois employs a series of misdirections—non-sequiturs, substitutions, and paradoxical statements. And she juxtaposes sensory language in such a way that each line reads like a tiny explosion on the page: “Pour me a glass of hot country, Montreal is freezing” (9).The experience of poetry is not all that different from the experience of working on a crossword puzzle. Mulling over the words and trying to figure out what the poet is communicating is part of the delight. I wish someone had told me back when I started reading poetry that it’s okay be confused or disoriented and that there isn’t just one interpretation. Poetry isn’t just one thing—if you don’t like one type of poetry, you might just like another.So if all the clambering about Poetry Month has you even a little bit curious about poetry—then consider checking out these books.* * *Kathryn Mockler is a writer, poet, and screenwriter. She is the author of the poetry books The Purpose Pitch (Mansfield Press, “a stuart ross book,” Spring 2015), The Saddest Place on Earth (DC Books, 2012), and Onion Man (Tightrope Books, 2011). Her writing has been published in Found Press, Geist, This Magazine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Currently, she is the Toronto editor of Joyland: a hub for short fiction and the publisher of the online literary and arts journal The Rusty Toque.