Yes, my copy of Danielle Janess’s The Milk of Amnesia looks a little scuffed. It’s been bumping around in my backpack for weeks as I tried to find time to read it during the busiest December of my career, which is unfortunate, really, since a) it’s a wonderful book, and b) it came from the publisher’s warehouse bearing the author’s signature, which was unexpected. I finally finished it this afternoon in one of the gymnasiums, pacing between rows of tiny desks as my students wrote their final examination. Here is my brief report.
The Milk of Amnesia is a book of lyric poems that inhabits the form of a five-act play, the way a hermit-crab essay inhabits whatever form its author has chosen. I wouldn’t call it a closet drama, although the third act, “The Wound Carnival,” gets close to being something you could imaging being performed but not quite. Janess’s use of drama as a shell in which to carry this play isn’t a surprise, since she has a theatre background.
As the title suggests, this is a book about trying to remember and inevitably forgetting–not only one’s own stories and experiences, but those of one’s ancestors. That forgetting, as the title’s pun also indicates, can be necessary: both medicine and poison, perhaps. In Janess’s case, she’s thinking about stories from her mother’s family: Polish refugees who came to Canada after the war after enduring the Nazis and the Soviets. Some of the poems track the process of attempting to find documentary evidence of what happened to her forebears; others tell their improbable but true stories. But the book also recounts Janess’s travels through Germany and Poland as well as her memories of her family in Canada. The language is rich and precise, and in a way it’s good that I was forced by circumstances to read it slowly. Like some decadent mittel-European dessert, it might’ve been too much had I tried to read it in one sitting. I had to pause, think, double-check vocabulary I didn’t know. Janess is a linguist and translator as well as a performer and poet, and the glossary she provides her readers is welcome to folks like me who struggle to get by in just one language, never mind four or five.
My favourite poem here is the title poem, which is the second-to-last in the book. It brings together all of the book’s themes in a dizzying seven-page series of prose poems. I was happy it came so close to the end, because by then I was ready for it; I understood the territory the book had staked out for itself.
I highly recommend The Milk of Amnesia. I am looking forward to Janess’s next book.