pauldbwatkins book review, Indigenous, Literature

A Review of Jordan Abel’s NISHGA 

With vulnerability and bravery, Jordan Abel mines his past in relation to Canada’s legacy of colonialism and residential schools to ask difficult questions about Indigeneity and Canada that don’t always have clear answers. Framing his project (the book grew out of his doctoral thesis) in relation to “research creation”—an innovative form of cultural analysis that troubles the book or thesis—Abel takes an innovative approach to addressing what it means to be dispossessed and disenfranchised as an Indigenous person. Abel is known for his concrete and conceptual poetry—The Place of Scraps won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Injun won the Griffin Poetry Prize—and NISHGA applies his same creative skill to rework the memoir into something wholly unique, mixing and remixing art, legal documents, personal narrative, photography, transcriptions of talks, and concrete poetry. The book opens and closes with “An Open Letter to All My Relations.” These letters invite readers into a space of healing and prepare them for the painful subjects of “intergenerational trauma, Indigenous dispossession, and the afterlife of Residential schools.” While these are difficult subjects to write about, especially from Abel’s subjectivity as an intergenerational survivor of residential schools, as well as his dislocation from his Nishga’a community, he does so with a level of deftness and care that makes the book essential reading for everyone living on Turtle Island.

Read my full review at The Malahat Review.

pauldbwatkins Academic, book review

A Multi-Generational Mixtape: A Review of Ian Williams’s Reproduction

Reproduction—the debut novel from Ian Williams—is an inventive multi-generational saga that pushes the limits of narrative and language. The novel explores the ways families are bonded, whether by blood, story, or choice. Its size, encyclopedic knowledge, Biblical intertextuality, and peregrination through the complicated genealogy of family (from the cycle of birth, life, and death) recall Steinbeck’s East of Eden, but in language and style it is closer to the work of Zadie Smith and the late David Foster Wallace. Fitting the cyclical nature of life and the seasons, the novel is told in four sections (with an interlude between them titled “The Sex Talk”), moving from Toronto in the late seventies to the mid-nineties, and finally to the present. Before the narrative proper, we encounter an upwards-moving genealogy that begins with “before” and then seven epigraphs. The genealogy—devoid of names, with representative sex chromosomes in their place—and the epigraphs, ranging from Margaret Atwood to Genesis, speak to Williams’ awareness that both he, as author, and his characters are part of an inherited chain of stories.

Click here to read my full review at Canadian Literature.

pauldbwatkins book review, Poetry

A Review of Ken Hunt’s The Lost Cosmonauts

With the spirit of exploration that sent Dante into the unknown, Ken Hunt’s poetry collection The Lost Cosmonauts examines the experiences of astronauts and cosmonauts who ventured into outer space, especially those who lost their lives in the pursuit of their missions. Drawing from myth, largely from the Greco-Roman pantheons, Hunt details the global and socio-political conflict of the Cold War era in relation to the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Following his debut collection, Space Administration (2014), Hunt’s The Lost Cosmonauts continues his exploration of language, history, and humankind’s endeavour to explore space. The book is a small thing to hold in your hands, but the ideas are expansive, moving from our nascent efforts to explore outer space to the celestial bodies of the planets in our solar system (the section “Celestial Bodies” is inspired by Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets). Engaging with a mythopoeia of the space race and showing an impressive control over poetic form and history, The Lost Cosmonauts is vital reading for those interested in the history and mythic significance of humanity’s explorations into space.

You can read my full review over at The Malahat Review, here.

pauldbwatkins book review, Literature

“An Incontestable Beauty”: A Review of Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black

Washington Black—the third novel by Esi Edugyan and her second to win the Giller Prize—depicts the life of Washington (Wash) Black, who rises above the conditions of his time to shape a life based on his imagination, intelligence, and artistic talent. Wash seeks freedom and dignity in a society that would deny him the right to be fully human. The novel opens when Wash is eleven years old (it is narrated from his perspective as an eighteen-year-old) on Faith Plantation in Barbados in 1830. The contrast between a young and curious Washington and the injustice of his brutal surroundings is provided through the recollections of his older self: “What I felt at that moment, though I then lacked the language for it, was the raw, violent injustice of it all.” Edugyan does not shy away from the “unspeakable acts” of slavery and the way that slavery continues to affect Wash even when it is abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833. Edugyan’s writing—from her careful plotting to her complex characters—speaks a veritable truth about what it means to be truly free.

You can read my full review over at Canadian Literature, here.

pauldbwatkins book review, Indigenous, Poetry

A Review of Shane Rhodes’s Dead White Men

Shane Rhodes’s stunning sixth collection of poetry, Dead White Men, repurposes settler texts with pioneering deftness (words cascade, fonts change, statues silhouette, language obliterates), using poetry to critically interrogate the Eurocentrism found in many foundational settler texts. While the names of many dead white men have faded in the annals of history, their mythopoeic justifications for colonization remain woven into the fabric of Euro-American society. Stories shape our beliefs and ethics, and so there’s good reason to go back to colonial origin stories, especially given the cultural amnesia around them. As Rhodes explains in the Notes section, “I was interested in looking to these past stories (especially those focused on North America and the South Pacific), not to add to the fictions of past white heroism but to better understand the problematic relationship between the stories, the mythologies they have become, and the lands and peoples they describe.”

You can read my full review over at The Malahat Review, here.

Screen Shot 2018-01-27 at 11.15.11 AM

pauldbwatkins book review

“holding each other up”: A Review of Katherena Vermette’s The Break

Katherena Vermette’s The Break is a devastatingly beautiful novel that depicts the bonds between the women of an extended Indigenous family. With warp and weft, Vermette weaves together the voices of numerous intergenerational women to tell their personal stories as they deal with the enduring after-effects of trauma. The prose is sparse, yet dense (“Stella blinks a tear”), as the narrative takes a bare-knuckles approach to cut a jagged truth. Like her stunning poetic debut, North End Love Songs (2012), The Break deftly crafts Vermette’s complex relationship to Winnipeg’s North End. A surface reading concerns the mystery surrounding the sexual assault of a thirteen-year-old Métis girl vis-à-vis the police procedural that unfolds as a result of the crime: “Aboriginal female. Blood loss. Signs of sexual assault.” But the novel is far more complex than this, using numerous viewpoints to reveal the complicated sociopolitical conditions that produce violence and racism, and that cause harm to people, especially women, in Indigenous communities.

…

Click here to read my full review at Canadian Literature.