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A Violent Streak by Stephanie Warner (Fitzhenry & Whiteside $15)
Review by Elee Kraljii Gardiner
Stephanie Warner’s debut collection of poetry, A Violent Streak begins with the title poem describing the hard living in “Fort McMoney,” her term for Fort McMurray.
where all their best boys go. Return two years later
with a souped-up Chevy, stereo-surround and oxblood seats, missing a hand.
Written in triplets this poem sketches a northern life of “ex-Hutterite kids, out of their minds on moonshine” and “A nephew mangled in a bailer; others dismantled more elegantly / by drink and the Bashaw casino.”
Some of the poems, such as “The Queen of Spades,” track the speaker’s experience in Dawson City, home of the infamous Downtowner’s pickled toe drink, made with the actual frostbitten human digit, where the speaker has:
a job chamber maiding, and you try to muster up
the prospector’s zeal, as your hands crack, bleed
folding sheets straight out of the industrial dryers.
Already half-cut on the mickey left in your last
as a tip, as you pin more and more of your life
to the axis of a cool crease, on the snap of sheets
perfectly set, and the certainty that any odour
(jizz, stale wine, fags in the toilet bowl, black-out sex) will be trumped by the chemical
spray making progress in your lungs.
In “fire season,” we read these associative words: flicked cigarettes, good fires, lightning-struck, lava flows, carrier oil, fire, a superhero flick, electricity dosed, scorched earth, and ultimately, “the kinked garden hose / of catastrophic thinking.”
We know fast cars do damage: to the environment, the parking lot, wildlife. “The Heart Land” is one of the best (meaning viscerally accurate) poems I’ve read about a collision with a deer, referred to as a “dowry of wasted meat; its blood purling, still hot/ through the sagging glass.”
The pleasure in A Violent Streak is knowing Warner will push the limit; just short of a game of literary chicken, she is never out of control. Warner’s thrill is the intensity of her images and settings. In “Surface” she describes a childhood dare from boys to let fire ants crawl up the speaker’s body: “the ants clotted/ like pomegranate seeds, sequining my legs, until another slap/of God-water, like a sheet of tin, scraped them.”
Stephanie Warner’s A Violent Streak is cutthroat and clever, never pretentious and never hobbled by shame or preciousness, which makes me love it all the more. 9781554554461
Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s most recent book is Trauma Head (Anvil, 2018). She co-edited V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp, 2012) with John Asfour.
Review by Elee Kraljii Gardiner
Stephanie Warner’s debut collection of poetry, A Violent Streak begins with the title poem describing the hard living in “Fort McMoney,” her term for Fort McMurray.
where all their best boys go. Return two years later
with a souped-up Chevy, stereo-surround and oxblood seats, missing a hand.
Written in triplets this poem sketches a northern life of “ex-Hutterite kids, out of their minds on moonshine” and “A nephew mangled in a bailer; others dismantled more elegantly / by drink and the Bashaw casino.”
Some of the poems, such as “The Queen of Spades,” track the speaker’s experience in Dawson City, home of the infamous Downtowner’s pickled toe drink, made with the actual frostbitten human digit, where the speaker has:
a job chamber maiding, and you try to muster up
the prospector’s zeal, as your hands crack, bleed
folding sheets straight out of the industrial dryers.
Already half-cut on the mickey left in your last
as a tip, as you pin more and more of your life
to the axis of a cool crease, on the snap of sheets
perfectly set, and the certainty that any odour
(jizz, stale wine, fags in the toilet bowl, black-out sex) will be trumped by the chemical
spray making progress in your lungs.
In “fire season,” we read these associative words: flicked cigarettes, good fires, lightning-struck, lava flows, carrier oil, fire, a superhero flick, electricity dosed, scorched earth, and ultimately, “the kinked garden hose / of catastrophic thinking.”
We know fast cars do damage: to the environment, the parking lot, wildlife. “The Heart Land” is one of the best (meaning viscerally accurate) poems I’ve read about a collision with a deer, referred to as a “dowry of wasted meat; its blood purling, still hot/ through the sagging glass.”
The pleasure in A Violent Streak is knowing Warner will push the limit; just short of a game of literary chicken, she is never out of control. Warner’s thrill is the intensity of her images and settings. In “Surface” she describes a childhood dare from boys to let fire ants crawl up the speaker’s body: “the ants clotted/ like pomegranate seeds, sequining my legs, until another slap/of God-water, like a sheet of tin, scraped them.”
Stephanie Warner’s A Violent Streak is cutthroat and clever, never pretentious and never hobbled by shame or preciousness, which makes me love it all the more. 9781554554461
Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s most recent book is Trauma Head (Anvil, 2018). She co-edited V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp, 2012) with John Asfour.
