{"id":10947,"date":"2021-12-21T16:30:51","date_gmt":"2021-12-21T11:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/only-card-deck-of-knives-lauren-turner\/"},"modified":"2023-02-14T01:32:16","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T20:32:16","slug":"only-card-deck-of-knives-lauren-turner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/only-card-deck-of-knives-lauren-turner\/","title":{"rendered":"Dealing the Deck: The Only Card in a Deck of Knives<\/em> by Lauren Turner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Drawing on some of the tenets of Johanna Hedva\u2019s sick woman theory but performing deft dances of her own, Turner re-appropriates romanticized myths of violence\u2014especially the archetype of the demon lover\u2014to crush them and sift through the shards. The book offers a number of long poems which are buoyed by Turner\u2019s skill in attenuating a narrative into ironic aphorisms and lived contradictions. This deck of knives offers an extended look at the chaos and re-ordered conditions of living in a chronically ill body. It\u2019s never easy to get the body onto a page, something Turner acknowledges, but the urgency of the text derives from her poetic work to capture bodily consciousness and identify the extra (and often gendered) labour of occupying a body that does not do everything you want\/need it to do.<\/p>\n

In \u201cBlitzed Out,\u201d for example, Turner notes that \u201cblame is so reductionist\u201d as she searches for other ways to gloss the trope\u2014and the reality\u2014of an unfaithful male lover, including the caveat that \u201cno one appreciates this re-telling.\u201d Her alignment of a toxic relationship with a mostly-female-contracted illness (lymphangioleiomyomatosis, aka LAM) makes hay out of the metaphor of invasion and not being able to breathe. To read Turner\u2019s take on mansplaining about the force of demanding patient behaviour is to laugh even as you choke. Another sequence, the chilling and vital \u201cQuit Trying to Die,\u201d notes that the disease\u2019s blossoming flora on the lungs \u201csounds like a fairy tale to scare little girls\u201d with tumours spread throughout the body like stars in the night sky.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Girding these sequences is the multi-page essay-poem \u201cA Masculine Division,\u201d cannily offered here as an appendix, even though it is neither the end of the book nor supplementary to it. (This is the kind of poetic lie I am very partial to.) Turner\u2019s statement \u201cGendered violence draws years from me\u201d will resonate for many readers. \u201cStop Bringing Me Here,\u201d the last poem in the book, asks, \u201cDid I err as a poet or as a woman?\u201d and this question stopped me cold, though ruthlessly, the line continues \u201cI wasn\u2019t taught to respect either one.\u201d The great and much-missed Irish feminist poet Eavan Boland wrote, \u201ca wounded history, public or private, is always volatile,\u201d and Boland, nobody\u2019s fool, argues for the efficacy and bone-deep necessity for such volatility. I\u2019m with Boland and with Turner: blame is reductionist, but our errors make meaning of our histories.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tanis MacDonald\u2019s<\/strong> fourth book of poetry, Mobile<\/em>, was longlisted for the 2020 Toronto Book Award, and her personal essay, “Mondegreen Girls,” won the 2021 Open Season Award in The Malahat Review<\/em>. Recent work has appeared in Grain<\/em>, The Phare<\/em>, and Atlantis<\/em>. Tanis’s next book, Straggle: Adventures in Walking while Female<\/em>, will come out with Wolsak & Wynn in spring 2022. She lives in Waterloo, Ontario.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

ARC<\/a> HITS THE HEART HARD.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Always read the notes first. The final pages of Lauren Turner\u2019s debut collection The Only Card in a Deck of Knives<\/em> state \u201cThis is not a memoir but an imperfect gathering of personal thoughts.\u201d Imperfection\u2014the blemish that reveals mystery\u2014is poetry, or as Joy Harjo writes, \u201cwhere there are no mistakes, there is no poetry.\u201d Turner\u2019s post-text warning also includes an admonition from Bj\u00f6rk: \u201cdon\u2019t let poets lie to you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"10129,10607,10047,9811","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1718,1967],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[226],"issue":[],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[3132],"topic":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10947"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=10947"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=10947"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=10947"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=10947"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=10947"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=10947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}