Emily Davidson: Lift
The debut collection of New Brunswick poet Emily Davidson, Lift is an examination of how to be alive without being adrift. Loosely narrative, the collection spans two Canadian coasts, its speaker a transplant from Atlantic to Pacific. Lift asks questions of mannequins in shop windows, of revellers at house parties, of ex-lovers and classic films and grade-school dramas. Through careful observation, wry humour, and inquisitive uncertainty, Davidson charts her course through solitude and disconnection back to her roots and into the unknown. Comprising poems that are colloquial and elaborate, familiar and fresh, unshrinking and compassionate, Lift assembles a miscellany of what is borne away on the tide, and what comes back again. It carves a path through the world, into the heart, and at last arrives at home.
Kayla Czaga: Dunk Tank
In the title poem of Kayla Czaga’s sophomore collection, a teenage speaker is suspended between knowledge and experience, confidently hovering there before the world plunges her into adult life. Dunk Tank reimagines the body as a strange and unknowable landscape: full of cancers that “burst like blackberries,” a butt that could run for prime minister of Canada, and the underworld lurking in Winona Ryder’s pores. Clouds become testicles and uteri turn into goldfish, flickering and fragile, but still ultimately glowing. These poems explore the varied and strange relationships that underpin a young woman’s coming of age, from inconsequential boyfriends to the friendships that rescue us from “grey daily moments.” Unsure of how the world works and her part in it, Czaga forges a landscape of metaphor and gleaming, dense imagery. Dunk Tank is playful and dark, comic and disturbing.