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

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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.