“Why is the world always fucking ending?” the protagonist of ʔbédayine asks. Spoken with the urgency of youth, the question isn’t rhetorical, but rather gestures toward an ongoing apocalypse. A genre-bending novella in stories and poems, Kaitlyn Purcell’s debut makes visible the harrowing realities of which most Canadians are aware, but about which we rarely read in the first person.

ʔbédayine follows Ronnie, a young Dene woman, from her community “just above the border between alberta and the northwest territories” to Edmonton’s underbelly, where she struggles to find footing. Haunted by visions of ecological disaster and constantly aware of the threat of violence, she tries to get high enough to transcend her circumstances. The narrative takes on an elastic quality, as Ronnie’s grip on reality loosens and tightens, and prose breaks off into verse:

downtown’s latest perversion:
a chemical amalgam of psychedelics form the tipsy
brush strokes of starry night across empty cement
blue pills for blue tongues the unduly fluorescence
musk rainbow stank a tooth hard pimp

Her drug use, which begins as a search for love and meaning through sensory experience, quickly slips into the detachment of addiction. If some of the drug-fuelled visions feel like familiar literary territory, there are moments, too, of stark clarity, especially when Ronnie encounters other Indigenous people in the city and searches for a sign of recognition. “We were supposed to be sisters,” she remarks to herself after being beaten up by a pair of girls. “i remember feeling weird / about the ‘indian’ that i was.”

Her bond with Thana, the friend with whom she left home, is a refuge and the book’s redemptive refrain. It suggests that in the face of desperation and despair, the love between two women may be the bridge that can stretch over the edge of end times, toward freedom.

***

“To be unworthy and yet to rise again, / that is the survivor’s dilemma: / To be in the world and taking more / than giving.” Sina Queyras’s latest chapbook, Swelles, juxtaposes the paralysis of grief with the obligation to live well because we have outlived others. Its laments and supplications read like a prayer, addressed not to God, but to that other higher power, Siri. A shower of inquiries ends with:

Are these things equally important? Is there
A hierarchy of meaning? Is anything a priority
or is everything a priority? I just want to know

where to focus, or, I want to believe I still can.

“The Zuckerbergs and Bezos are inside us,” observes the poem’s speaker, who is online and overwhelmed by “the search string” before she is out of bed. Here we come to suspect that wisdom is impossible in the Information Age, and without wisdom, what does it mean to mature as an artist? The rewards of midlife are the disciplines of parenthood, mentorhood, menopause, and the mourning of mothers and sisters “wrapped / in their labours / and slid into the fire.” Surviving them is “a trial” and “an opulence.” “Make us worthwhile!” the dead demand of the living. But how?

Queyras is a bit of a giant on the Canadian poetry scene, and in Montreal more specifically. A member of Concordia’s English faculty, founder of the nine-lived literary blog Lemon Hound, and an active editor and critic, their influence stretches well beyond their own eight books, which is part of why this dark and intimate little volume is a pleasure: it feels like a distilled, concentrated taste of their powers.

***

There is a deliciously butch swagger to K.B. Thors’s debut poetry collection, Vulgar Mechanics. Perhaps it’s the distinctly Western landscape of many of these poems that lends them their wide-open bravado, or maybe it’s how their omnivorous diction mixes the vulgar with the sophisticated, the mechanical with the fecund. A triptych of poems entitled “Clutches, Struts and Brakes” is a salient example: are these nouns or verbs, car parts or dance moves?

The book’s early poems address the death of the poet’s mother. “Nothing umbilical about it,” quips the bereaved speaker of “Your Stomach or Mine?,” unmoored by loss. Grief tips toward anger more often than despair, perhaps because death is just one kind of loss. Several poems describe physical and sexual violence or the threat of it, particularly for queer people; “Pulse,” named for the Miami nightclub that was the scene of a 2016 mass shooting, is particularly searing. Other poems, such as “On the Planet of All Time: Tecumseh” and “Champagne Problems,” with nipple clamps and yeast infections in their first lines, strike a defiantly playful and profane note.

Thors’s background as a translator is often palpable. She pushes language around playfully, finding the place where play bends toward aggression, as it does in the sort-of ars poetica “Alter Ego”:

À la seam ripper cum scythe – string
theory plucked out stitch by step.
Pants become a smock real
fast when serge pulls loose from angle
up, a sine wave sea serpent above and
below the surface.

Some lyrics veer so deeply into this play, they get lost in their own interiority, but where they stay connected, their bald ferocity is exciting. mRb