Alix Hawley, Your Eye: On Photography. Windsor, Ontario: Woodbridge Farm Books, 100 copies, 2019.

https://thewoodbridgefarm.com/chapbooks

I very much like the idea of a chapbook publisher encouraging the creation of new texts, and Woodbridge Farm Books has found quite a nice idea for doing so.  “Writers at Rest: Authors on their Pastimes & Hobbies” is the name of a series that is meant to complement a residency program. Participants are asked to write about something other than their work.  A writer not talking about writing?  What a swell idea.

The fiction writer Alix Hawley’s “Your Eye: On Photography” is the third in the series.  First I must complement the look and feel of these small chapbooks—everything from the dimensions to the Zephyr laid paper (a tip-off that the book has been printed by Coach House Books) to the small, clean type is admirable, and the two that I own are graced with images as well.

Hawley is refreshingly uninterested in taking photographs for any reason other than her own pleasure, although she does share them on Instagram.  In fact, it was her need to feed that particular social-media beast that encouraged her to return to a practice that she had once enjoyed as a kid.  But in a series of associations around the idea of making images she goes back farther:

First, I thought about a friend I had in preschool, whose face I can’t remember.  Just her hair, thick and dark as an ebony frame.  I thought about being very young and closer to the ground-level and to things in general, the way you find faces everywhere then, in tree bark or twisted sheets.

She goes on to find the origin of her eye for ordinary things: 

If I’d had a camera then, I probably would have taken pictures of the shower, the dark closet, the cat as seen from the rear….  Maybe I’d photograph the house, with its chimney and green roof.  Maybe adults’ stalky legs.  Maybe my toys.  Probably not my younger siblings.   Probably no human faces, which didn’t seem so important or so close.

If I’m not careful, this review will be nothing but direct, telling quotations.  Hawley thinks about (every section begins with “thinking” about something) finger-painting, about the appeal of garbage, about school photographs.  She has a very precise visual memory, recalling the colour of the school photo backgrounds (“a flat dry blue like a cake of unused paint”) and how the photographer asked them to look up in a certain way, “as if we were maybe at an airport waiting for planes to deliver gifts or relatives.”

She received her first camera, a simple point-and-shoot Ricoh, when she was twelve.  Inevitably, the prints that came back from the drugstore were disappointing.  Then the camera got lost and so did the hobby until adulthood, when she directed her phone away from the kids and towards a C-shaped picnic table that, along with its shadow, became almost abstract.  Since then have come many more, taken quickly and carelessly, without thought.  Without, she does not say, the thought that writing demands, but it is easy to see how refreshing such a practice might be.

Interestingly, the last association isn’t about photography at all but learning to drive and the taking of a colour-blindness test.  There’s nothing definitive about the essay, nothing formal. Instead, perhaps it is a writer allowing herself to do in words what she usually reserves for the camera: don’t think, just write.

Justin Million, Kill Your Way North. Peterborough, Ontario: bird, buried press, 50 copies, 2020.

https://birdburiedpress.wordpress.com/

Let it be said that I like a good dystopian, apocalyptic literary novel as much as the next person.  Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?  Check.  P.D. James’ Children of Men?  Done.  Emily St. John Mandel’s Station 11? Roger that.  But I had not encountered a dystopian, apocalyptic poem in which characters keep moving, weapons handy, and try not to remember the before days when there were “tall cans and peanut butter.”  Not, at least, before reading Justin Million’s chilling poetry sequence with a title that sounds like the kind of movie I watch when my partner is out for the night.

But it’s time to put the joking tone aside, for Million is not in a joking mood and given the state of the world and the prognosis for the future, there’s no reason he should be.  The short lines and fragmented sections of Kill Your Way North do an admirable job of conveying the alternating emotions of sadness, desperation, fear, and anger, while keeping the narrative rolling the way the characters themselves keep moving ahead.

            We have to

            Kill

            To survive

            We have to

            Have that

capacity

The characters include the speaker (presumably male), his female partner, and a dog.  The dog is the only one with a name—Nutmeg—and I suppose it’s ironic that the pooch eventually gets eaten and receives one last “good girl” from her affectionate owner.    They are moving through the woods of northern Ontario towards Provoking Lake, an exquisite spot near Algonquin Park (I looked at online photographs).  Along the way they encounter a stranger:

            We have not achieved telepathy

            so

            she does

            that passé romantic gesture

            and puts her finger

            to my lips

            to remind me to shut the fuck up

The stranger has a gun but the poet’s partner is faster with her knife and while she ends up with “thick blood/on her hands” she also reminds us that there is no need to descend into barbarism and that these new kills “shouldn’t be praised”.

Apparently, it is hard to keep an artist down, for the speaker is writing a play and tells us, without any irony that I can detect, “I’m sure/there will be a crowd somewhere for it”.  Even so, there’s not much hope to be found in this poem, nor belief in anything communal or collective or spiritual.  Not when “the individual’s/the new nation”.  Justin Million’s poem is a brief nightmare vision of the future, with a violent narrative to keep the pulse raising and—for good measure—a real match on the cover just in case we need to use the chapbook as kindling for our own fire.