White Lily’s cover features a striking white flower – a flower that, on closer inspection, reveals itself a carnation. The opening poems clarify this mix-up as a reference to musician Laurie Anderson and director Michael Fassbender, but the process of misapprehension, disorientation, and discovery is also a fitting metaphor for the experience of reading the collection. Though dedicated to lyric poet Louise Glück, and sharing her propensity for minimalism, restraint, and mythological allusion, Vincent’s poems are a distinct species of their own.

White Lily
John Emil Vincent

McGill-Queen’s University Press
$19.95
paper
104pp
9780228023777

The collection is divided into three sections – “White Lily,” “Wrecked Utopia Tour of the Endless Mountain Region,” and “What Flowers Mean” –  the first of which I found especially compelling for the specificity of its self-critique and its tempering of painful emotions with interpersonal affection. Other standout moments in the book include poems where the speaker turns his acid tongue on homophobic strangers, as well as the collection’s final poem, “Tall Poppy Syndrome,” which concludes with a moving callback to the collection’s beginning. 

White Lily explores difficult mental states with a frankness that makes Vincent’s voice distinct. The poet’s strongest collection yet, these poems ask how to make peace with a self one can neither entirely disclose nor entirely escape. mRb