Review of Wellwater by Karen Solie

by Maddie Yates

How does life respond to a hostile world? In her newest collection of poetry, Wellwater, Karen Solie goes underground. An acclaimed Canadian poet from Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, her work blends rhetorical flourish and philosophy with the harsh perfection of the northern landscape. Solie’s recent poetry is a reversion: to childhood, to the subterranean, to the atomic. 

Solie speaks apocalyptic knowledge from a basement shelter, but the tap root of her genius resists the imposition of man-made structure. She offers us a counter to consciousness and the stories we tell ourselves about the proceedings of life. Occasionally, a second voice surfaces in gentle italics, prodding a dialogue with our preconceptions. As Solie returns to the past, she asks us to question what facets of our knowledge still hold water in a modern age. 

The stark natural landscapes of her poetry are aware of a lingering danger in pesticides and genetic modifiers. Brand names—“Luxxor™,” “Prosaro™, Folicular™”—are never more than an em dash away from a crucial food source, or a sacred deer (Red Spring). Cruel habitats can also be sites of vast clarity. Barren trees in a municipal park are logical as theorems (The Trees In Riverdale Park), and a pile of dirt fractures into a thousand perfect arguments (That Which Was Learned In Youth Is Always Most Familiar).

Be awed by the expansive voltas of Solie’s poetry. At times, Wellwater  feels like a prophecy, but mentions of economic toil and anthropogenic destruction situate the collection  firmly in the present day. Major themes of her collection include economic toil, anthropogenic destruction, and appropriation of indigenous lands. The Canadian territory so central to each poem turns on the modern individual and invades our boundaries of contemplation, philosophy, and rationality. It cannot be owned. Even the machine is a futile warhorse, taking shape in a careless snowplow (The Snowplow). We have tried to tame the revolutionary Tyger. But this effort always fails except to turn us into another cyborg, hands vibrating with the wheel. 

Solie’s collection is full of desks for unsatisfying bureaucratic confrontation. At best, authorities offer blunt wisdoms like, “Whoever has no house now, will never have one.” (Autumn Day). Here comes fruitless bargaining in search of a home. We must at least desire “micro-suites, the bug-ridden/and the windowless”: costly Toronto apartments with all their puritanical charm (Toronto The Good). They are preferable to dire homelessness. It seems there is no escape from bodily need. So far from the “bee-loud glade” are the buzzing LEDs and industrial fans of a hospital (Possible Confounding Influences). Bleakly, we are unable to sustain and heal in these conditions. Solie prescribes a return to nature. 

But Karen Solie wants a new kind of Romanticism. She shifts between frivolous beauty and precise, eerie imagery. Solie’s glade is livid. It points. The northern wilderness sees you, so reasoned, and informs you with a repulsed indifference. Solie’s Wellwater resists hailing enlightenment from nature. We should not mine for resources, life-force, or wisdom. Instead, knowledge is offered in darkness. It is radical to shun sight in an increasingly visual world. According to Solie, we ought to return to the most basic senses and to experience.

Edited by Annabella Lawlor and Ava Rukavina.

Review of The Idea of an Entire Life by Billy-Ray Belcourt

By Natalie Co

The Idea of an Entire Life, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s new poetry collection, evades linearity. Belcourt, a queer writer and member of the Driftpile Cree Nation, upends linear time by interrogating the act of documentation. Poems titled “Autofiction,” “Fieldnotes,” “Endnotes,” and “20th-Century Cree History” appear multiple times, each with something different to say; another titled “Preludes” arrives in the middle of the collection. History is always happening, and the myth of the future lies just beyond—or behind—the horizon. In other words, “the present consists / of that which precedes it” (“The Past Tense”), while “in years, it still / won’t be the future,” the future being “something / we leave behind” (“Sincerity”). Time is revolving around something. The Treaty 8 document forced Cree, Beaver, Chipewyan, and other First Nations to surrender land to the government; uprooted and uproots countless lives; and chains them to “the end of the 19th century,” when the document was signed. “We are not citizens of a country,” says the speaker in the first of the collection’s four “Fieldnotes,” “we are citizens of a century.”  

Time is one dwelling. The speaker in “The Past Tense” also contends that “a man is a difficult thing / to dwell inside of.” In conversation with José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, a work of theory on queer futurity, Belcourt strings together a continuous series of “Cruising Utopia Sonnets.” The speaker “want[s] to believe / in the possibility of an existing gay lifeworld.” This world glints, just out of reach. Belcourt’s series of sonnets are far-reaching in their intense vulnerability. They cruise through sex, love, physical distance, and the danger and reality of queer love in the present day. Still, the speaker finds freedom in the possibility of a sonnet as “a gay space that is weirdly / liberating.” In this pocket of existence where desire, time, and place dance in circles, the speaker exclaims that “we can still become what we will one day touch!” 

Even as time turns the seasons and the world sinks into hibernation, life persists. In “A Prayer,” the speaker resides on the west coast, where “‘the earth is still green.’” This land is elusive, weaving around words and meaning. Forests are tied to desperation (“Fieldnotes”), are the act of listening that bridge poetry and death (“Sentimentality”), and, in an erasure poem referencing settler correspondence over Treaty 8, join with time as the “well wooded years in all of us” (“Fieldnotes”). Winter is both something to be outlasted (“Perspective”) and the kingdom of “bright light” in which everything will eventually be buried beneath snow (“Subarctica”). The lake is the speaker’s ancestor (“Fieldnotes”), the language of “its long edge a line breaking / at [their] exposed feet” (“Future Thinking”). 

Neither the land nor the people that inhabit it can be contained within a single record. Belcourt’s collection archives hope and despair, but it also reaches for something just beyond the “equal amount / of joy and heartache” in his speaker’s life (“An Entire Life”). The circularity and repetition of titles throughout The Idea of an Entire Life dismantles the myth of linear history; on the level of the individual piece, poetry becomes a record of what could be. “I write poems / to remind myself I am in love with a freedom / I haven’t yet experienced,” says the speaker in “Realism.” There, in the distance—beyond the vistas of forests, lakes, winters, bodies, centuries, and documents—it is time for something new to come around the bend.

Edited by Noah Bendsza and Noah Adelman-Ciubotaru.

Mona Awad’s We Love You, Bunny Is Self-Critical to a Fault—or Is It?

By AnnaClare Sung

If readers of Mona Awad’s Bunny exist in Wonderland, We Love You, Bunny forces them to gaze through the looking-glass at its mirror-world, bearing a resemblance—just slightly askew. Though still on Warren’s fictional Ivy League campus, the novel unfolds following the release of Bunny. The first novel gave readers a glimpse into MFA student Samantha’s unstable mind, beginning with her singular point of view, then cascading into a first-person plural mode, operated by Samantha and her four ex-besties’ Gestaltian hive consciousness. The sequel shifts perspective—if only slightly—and directs our attention to Coraline, Kyra, Viktoria, and Elsinore, best recognized by their collective nickname: Bunny. Even more detached from reality, the hive-minded, saccharine Bunnies seek vengeance for their unsavoury portrayal in Bunny, written canonically by Samantha herself, rather than the corporeal Awad. We Love You, Bunny begins in Kyra’s attic—the very place where, with a quick seance and explosion, the girls turned real bunnies into swooningly sexy, albeit intellectually uncouth, men—with a physically restrained Samantha, and the Bunnies finally telling her, and the reader, their side of the story. 

What ensues is a narrative wherein everyone is Bunny, yet Bunny is no one. Awad’s sequel displays a speculative creation that forces its characters to confront chaos and the self, and prompts readers to reckon with reality; a ‘Romantasy’ that is critical of its genre, yet lauds authorial agency; and a Frankenstein of form—acutely self-conscious and allusory. From Alice in Wonderland to Hamlet, Brothers’ Grimm, Kafka, Coraline, Heathers, Taylor Swift, Kate Bush, and Chappell Roan, we cannot attribute We Love You, Bunny’s orchestra of references to pastiche alone. Indeed, Awad’s creation astutely comments on women’s place in the contemporary cultural sphere. Aligning the Bunnies with both Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein, she stitches together chapters from the perspectives of each Bunny, and, intermittently, from the experimental manuscript penned by Aerius—their first and most beloved bunny-turned-man creation. Through the Bunnies' stories, Awad provides a haven for the girl who is well-versed in weaponizing her pop cultural proclivities, constructing a persona that teeters between the masses and highbrow. She appeals to everyone and disrupts no one. 

It is in the shifting perspectives of Coraline, Kyra, Viktoria, and Elsinore, though, that the novel regresses. Within We Love You, Bunny, Awad positions herself and her work in the publishing world alongside Bunny, using its significant success and notable features as an anchor from which she cannot quite unmoor. Reframing real critiques of Bunny, and relocating them to the Bunnies’ sequential work of fiction, Awad’s self-awareness emerges as a narrative limitation—all the more interesting given Samantha’s physical duress throughout the novel. Under Awad’s pseudonym, Samantha (the fictional author of Bunny), as well as The Bunnies (the fictional authors of We Love You, Bunny), are “too literary.” Yet, simultaneously, their work is “actually pretty commercial [...] like [they] have wide appeal!” Through compounding allusions, the distinction between author, character, and reader disintegrates as the novel descends into chaos. Using this sort of literary face-blindness, Awad/the Bunnies construct a world that shields each figure from any external criticism. In doing so, though, Awad prevents the Bunnies from evolving beyond surface-level characterization, rendering an otherwise colourful novel monochromatic. 

Ironically, driving much of We Love You, Bunny’s plot is Arieus’s irate desire to “Kill Allen,” the professor whose critiques the Bunnies refuse to accept—a refusal licensed by the fact that, in the novel, the art and artist cannot be separated. Internalizing the Bunnies’ psyches, hearing their thoughts, and acting upon their impulses, Aerieus is his own person in name alone. Allen’s criticisms then become a direct attack on the Bunnies’ selves, yet, sending Aerieus as an anonymous figure to seek their revenge, they are absolved from any further criticism. 

This disorder of self, personal taste, and narrative becomes further disrupted when acknowledging the destructive, patricidal nature of Shelley’s Frankensteinian monster, and the similarly motivated Aerius. Of course, Awad protects herself from authorial demise in the chapters from Aerius’ perspective; beginning his anthropoid life under the Bunnies’ constant revision and refinement, Aerius eventually gains his own narrative voice, writing his desires into existence. Modelled after a ubiquitously recognized Hollywood actor, but obscure in almost every other way, Aerius, in typical Bunny fashion, is initially both someone and no one. 

Awad’s Aerius-centred chapters, however, are the novel’s most compelling and seem to flex a new, exciting narrative muscle of hers. As Aerius’ first-person narrative unfolds, he retaliates, transcending beyond facelessness as he forces recognition. It’s rare to read from the perspective of creation, rather than creator, and that is perhaps what makes Aerius’ chapters so rewarding. Forging a relationship with Jonah, a poetry student whom readers first met in Bunny, through his flirtatious interactions with Samantha, Aerius carves out a space where he’s known as an individual. Through her representation of Aerius, Awad adds dimension and idiosyncracy to her world of self-imposed homogeneity. 

If not for Awad’s unsuccessful attempt to convincingly depict the Bunnies’ perspective, then for her surprising portrayal of their creation Aerieus—and her unrelenting integration of literary and pop cultural references—We Love You, Bunny will resonate with readers who enjoyed its precursor, though, as it is with sequels, likely a little less. True, Awad’s self-awareness is a crutch that at times stunts the potential of her novel, but it is also an attribute that solicits extensive dissection and one that female readers cannot help but hate to relate to. Is that not worth commending all the same? 

Edited by Marcello Corbanese and Isabella McBride.