No, I’m not sorry I read this powerful and haunting book. It’s not an easy read, and (please consider this a trigger warning, although I don’t intend to go into details) I wouldn’t expect it to be: the subject matter, which includes child sexual abuse, ought to be difficult. If it weren’t, something would be wrong. And the author’s experience is, distressingly, too common. Maybe, if the stigma and silence that surrounds that kind of abuse were to be dispelled, it might happen less frequently, and if that’s the case, You Might Be Sorry You Read This will do important work. Brown clearly understands all of that. In “poetic statement,” she writes,
I write as a refusal to be silenced.
I write to resist shame.
I write as an answer to questions I’m tired of explaining.
I write to put down my side of the story.
I like the way she considers the embodied nature of both our experience and our writing:
We are, each of us, walking-around, knowing beings, holding ideas and memories that show in our gait, in the way we hold our face. A poem is an exercise in bringing forward from the body the sense of a moment–following my breath, the rise of my spine, the sense of my skin as I sit on a rock watching a heron hunt, or in my garden listening to bees in the borage, or as I walk an urban street and smell toast.
Brown is Métis, and some of the poems here consider the effects of Canada’s ongoing colonialism and the way that they have affected her. Those poems are angry, but why wouldn’t they be? “Beneficiaries of a Genocide,” for instance, addresses settler-descendants like me directly. That poem’s speaker demands that settlers identify themselves using that term, something many of us are reluctant to do, especially if we were born here, as I have learned from my students, and it rightly suggests an alternative term: “I don’t imagine you’ll like this term any better. / Beneficiary of a genocide. / But I think it narrows the argument.” “Let us stay in this room where you are now uncomfortable / and I am now unwelcome,” it concludes. “Let us begin with what you call yourselves.” The discomfort such discussions occasion, as I argue in my book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, is unpleasant–of course it it!–but it’s far less painful than living on a road allowance or being sent to a residential school. Let’s try to develop some sense of perspective.
My review of James Cairns’s fine book, In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times, is now up at the Miramichi Reader. I’m so happy for the opportunity to review books, because it pushes me to read more than I might otherwise. So thanks to Nick and Emma and everyone at the Miramichi Reader for their ongoing commitment to writing in Canada.
I haven’t been reading much for a couple of years, and that’s bothered me–a lot. The reasons aren’t hard to understand. I’ve been working too much and not sleeping enough, which has meant that when I get home, I’m too tired to concentrate. I still don’t get enough shuteye, but my job has eased up a little, and so I’ve been able to get at a few of the new books that have found their way into our house. Yes, even though I’ve struggled to read anything, I’ve still been buying books; I know that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s one of the things writers do.
I ordered Michael Trussler’s 10:10 when it came out last fall. Michael is a colleague and a friend, and I admire his writing. It’s erudite, thoughtful, concerned with the ways we are damaging the planet and ourselves, our horrific histories of genocide, and yet it also takes visual art–Vermeer, Rothko, Brueghel–as a sign of our potential, as a species, to do good things, to make beautiful things. Unlike me, Michael doesn’t seem to struggle to find time or energy to read, if the dense texture of allusions and quotations in 10:10 is any evidence–and it is. I’ve been meaning to read this book for a year, and I was finally motivated to open it when I learned, early yesterday morning, that it has been shortlisted for a Governor-General’s Literary Award. Yes, of course, many worthwhile books don’t get that kind of recognition, and yet I am so happy that Michael’s work is being recognized. He’s been prolific over the past several years, publishing three books of poetry and a memoir since 2021, and I know how much hard work and sacrifice has gone into that productivity. I knew 10:10 was on the shelf at work where I keep poetry, and I brought it home last night. I ended up devouring it in one sitting. It is a wonderful book.
The title made me think about time–Timex watches used to always be advertised with the hands showing “10:10,” and that’s true of other analog timepieces as well–and sure enough, the passing of time, and the way it is experienced in simultaneous layers, are both themes here. That simultaneity is hard to evoke in writing, since language tends to be linear (one word, one sentence, following another), but Michael plays with punctuation, enjambment, and textual interruptions of various kinds to suggest the way he might be sitting in his home office, writing, while remembering standing outside the building where Dutch diarist Etty Hillesum, who was murdered in Auschwitz, lived, while also recalling things she wrote about the experience of living in Nazi-occupied Holland. “The Edges of What’s Known?” includes lines from other poems or essays in the book–I’ve learned from Tanis MacDonald not to force genre categories onto hybrid texts, and I’m going to be careful not to make this mistake here–as another way to indicate a slightly different form of simultaneity. But that’s not exactly what 10:10 means. It’s a reference to Edward Kienholz’s large 1965 installation The Beanery, a life-size interior of a bar in which all of the human figures have clock faces, set to ten minutes after ten, where their actual fleshly faces would otherwise be. The title essay/poem, “10:10,” recalls different visits to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where Kienholz’s installation is located, in different decades of the author’s life, and it considers how his relationship to visual art has changed over time, as well as its connection, however oblique, to human violence: the war in Vietnam, the Holocaust. It ends with a couple of lines of poetry that interrupt a story about a 2014 visit to the Stedelijk, lines that seem to situate the text right here, in Regina, on a wintery day, far from Amsterdam, and yet on the following page we see a photograph (the author’s photographs appear at key points in this book) of a canal in that European city, “impossibly far from / here–.” Complexity, simultaneity, violence, and visual art as a kind of compensation: it’s all here.
So too are the climate crisis and the extinction event humans are causing, notably in “Solastalgia.” That title refers to Glenn Albrecht’s neologism, a word that combines nostalgia, solace, and desolation, or so I learned in a poetry workshop this week; it’s the sense of loss we experience when a place or ecosystem has been destroyed by human activity. The fragments in that text juxtapose different moments in Michael’s life, all of them suggesting the inexorable and accelerating passage of time, the need to love what remains NOW, because it’s leaving: “Better order now, the sky recommends, restaurant’s closing.”
I could go on about this book, which to be honest deserves a better, more skilled reader of poetry than I am. The winners of the Governor-General’s Literary Awards will be announced in a couple of weeks. I haven’t read the other nominees–that would be a worthwhile project, wouldn’t it?–and so I have no idea how 10:10 compares to them, but I’m happy that yesterday’s news prompted me to bestir myself to read it. Congratulations, Michael–you deserve the recognition.
I haven’t managed to finish a novel in months. I start one, get overwhelmed by work and put it down, then forget what was happening. It’s frustrating. But I finished Melanie Schnell’s The Chorus Beneath Our Feet. It held my attention even with the Jays game going on (visible in the background of my photograph).
I want to put aside the characters for a moment, even though I empathize with Jes, who’s battling multiple traumas while trying to save his sister from a dark fate. And the plot, which is full of surprises. Instead, I want to consider the poetry of the book’s title—the word “chorus.” What an evocative way to describe the fungi, microorganisms, and bones (among other things) beneath the earth’s surface. Did you know that we don’t have much of a clue about what was underneath the surface of the grassland that used to be here in southern Saskatchewan? It was ploughed under before anybody thought to ask. The interrelationships indicated by the word “chorus “—well, the suggestion of harmony, of a hidden music, really appeals to me.
A lot is happening in this novel. The Home Children, trees and fungi, development and corruption, magic (real and imagined), Canada’s participation in the war in Afghanistan: they’re all here, along with allusions to the gothic and to magic realism. I am reluctant to say more, because I don’t want to spoil anything for potential readers, and anyone reading this post is a potential reader of this book. I’m curious, though: what will happen to Mary? Will she be the protagonist of Schnell’s next novel?
So, pick up this novel, and enjoy this funhouse version of Regina. And its inclusion of uncomfortable aspects of the truth of this place.
My post on Canadian books about walking is up on 49th Shelf. I describe my connection to walking as a practice, and briefly consider 11 books on the subject. You can find the post here.
Today marks the official release of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. To celebrate, I’ll be on CBC Saskatchewan’s noon-hour program, Blue Sky, as part of a panel discussion about walking. Tune in if you can!
