Brandi Bird’s first full collection must be read with imagination and heart. The poems offer images, facts, and utterances linked not by logic or chronology but by memory, association, pain. Striking details accumulate power and depth of meaning as the book progresses—without section breaks—carrying the reader deep into the poet’s experience and evoking a story of community dislocation, family disintegration, grief, disorienting illness, spiritual confusion, personal loss. The reader feels how elements of this experience seep into the speaker’s skin and shape their physical and intellectual being. The book’s title, at first mystifying, encapsulates this process of melding the social with the personal. Emerging from the whole is a visceral, almost tactile portrait of a young Indigenous person searching for a sense of self, wholeness and belonging. Searching, too, for language to understand and make others understand their experience.
House of Anansi, 2023.
That search leads to unusual poetic forms. In “Countdown as Drunk Mothers” they paint a portrait of childhood neglect in short, numbered images. In “A Glossary of Illness” they evoke the speaker’s history of bulimia in short prose-poem definitions of terms. Other poems range from lyrics, both simple and multi-part, to concrete poems to odes. References to colonial wrongs are mostly glancing, so a reader not familiar with the history of the Selkirk area Indigenous community may summon Google for more context. But even without details of the political backdrop, the images and events of the poems themselves make clear history’s burden on the poet and members of their family.
Bird is a magician of metaphor. In “Burnt” they create a portrait of their brother in varied images of smoke, from a joint lit in his childhood bedroom—“The spirit of an ending in the way smoke drifts from his / mouth as he laughs”—to the ending: “I ghost through life & he phantoms. / He sinks into smoke. / He disappears.” In “Cougar Alert” they describe “the snow to my knees the cold froze / my eyelashes little hooks I blinked / & got fastened to.” “Pickerel,” one of the most harrowing poems, sketches their mother as a series of dangerous edges: “mother is sharp / as her / father’s filleting knife / a blade with eyes.”
The often-fragmented form of this work achieves a rare accomplishment: it conveys a difficult history without driving the reader away. It’s as if readers discover the history independently, feeling the poet’s struggles through our own flesh as they does through theirs. We do not despair for this protagonist—they are too smart and resourceful. With each re-read of this powerful and innovative work, we see more.
Bios
Jean Van Loon
Jean Van Loon is an Ottawa writer and a graduate of Carleton, Queen’s, Humber, and UBC. Her second poetry book, Nuclear Family, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in April 2022. Her first, Building on River (Cormorant, 2018), was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. Her story, “Stardust”, published in the Queen’s Quarterly, was included in Journey Prize Stories 19. Her stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in magazines from coast to coast. [updated in 2023]