“Dangerous Poems”: A Review of Lynn Tait’s You Break It, You Buy It

Lynn Tait’s poetry collection, You Break It, You Buy It, starts with a poem titled, “He Wants a Dangerous Poem” inspired by a workshop led by the famous Canadian poet Patrick Lane. At first, the speaker struggles to figure out what Lane is asking for in a poem: opening a vein, throwing bombs or carrying hash for her boyfriend—when doing so could land you in jail. As she ruminates on this question she concludes that “people can be dangerous. / Well, maybe more confusing, / a wearing down or out.” This is a great, ironic poem to begin this collection with; its strongest poems—those about the poet’s mother and son—challenge the reader with emotional authenticity evoked by beautifully crafted metaphors and imagery.

I know from my own experience that it is not easy to craft painful autobiographical material into strong poetry. Yet, the best poems in Lynn Tait’s collection do this with skill. In “Strip” the poem starts with the epigraph: “Mother takes off her belt / orders me to STRIP.” The poem’s sibilance and raw imagery present PTSD with all its visceral echoes:

It’s the hissing sound of cruelty 
the reek of dead forests and seedy carnivals 
the taste of sulfur 
secrets hidden under sandpaper. 

No matter what the context 
the word snaps
and I shudder.

In “No Certificate Can Explain Me” the speaker shares that the difficult relationship with her mother began with her birth. “In time, I became a wound, / too many colours for one woman.”

In “Clutter” the speaker evokes an undeveloped self well, how “she couldn’t hear her own voice, only Mother’s.” “She’s a children’s book with missing pages.”

However, some of the mother poems in the collection could have been left out, including “Frozen,” “Crash Landings” and “Mother Passed.” All have too much exposition and psychological jargon. In “Frozen” the Mother utters “a manipulating incantation.” In “Crash Landings,” the mother is prone to “sudden bursts of ego.” “Mother Passed” is more exposition than poetry. The best line in that poem describes the family memorial where “silence closed around [them] like a coffin.” The strongest mother poems in the collection evoke the speaker’s suffering very well; the inclusion of those which are much less evocative detracts from their power.

“Aletheia Speaks Out” starts the second part of the collection with the reminder that the speaker in these poems is seeking truth: “I love to throw myself against walls of mirrors, / see a thousand heads, all agreeable and in love.” She asserts “Any time someone asks for the truth, I tell them; but it’s seldom the answer they’re looking for.” You Break It, You Buy It is driven by a search for truth with its many poems about loss and struggles with narcissists.

The strength of this collection shines in the vulnerability of its best poems. The poem, “The Enemies We Cannot See” about the death of the poet’s son situates us with the epigraph “Stephen Tait: 1983-2012, from a fentanyl overdose.”

The poem begins, “By night, his enemies feasted on his heart, like flies / sensing his death. His flesh, a winter tree // …the wet cold part of him now part of me.”

The speaker’s son is “spread out and shining,” fed back to her “on a slab.” “But there’s a light his enemies forget to swallow.” The speaker closes her eyes: “The thought of his heart blinds me.”

I recommend You Break It, You Buy It for the beautifully crafted intensity of its most deeply felt poems.