Born in North Bay, Ontario, Jennica Harper lives in B.C. and has taught screenwriting at Vancouver Film School. With an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, she has published The Octopus and Other Poems (Signature Editions, 2006). The title poem concerns a debate between former lovers as to the merits of searching for extraterrestrial life. It was a finalist for a National Magazine Award.

Jennica Harper's third collection, Wood (Anvil, 2013), contains six poetry suites, starting with a meditation within the mind of Pinocchio and ending with a meditation within the mind of a minor, coming-of-age character from Mad Men, Sally Draper, who struggles to both emulate and rebuff the influence of her philandering father Don Draper, the successful advertising executive in the television series. Somewhat similarly, a suite called Papa Hotel playfully imagines having Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, Roman Polanksi, Peter Falk and Steve McQueen as father figures.

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Bounce House by Jennica Harper (Anvil Press $18)

Outside, America by Sarah de Leeuw (Nightwood $18.95)

Review by Carellin Brooks (BCBW 2020)

It has become fashionable, almost tiresomely so, to preach the gospel of mindfulness as a panacea for our overwrought age. Anxious? Terrified? Beset by dread? The answer, we are told, lies not in parsing our complicated geopolitics or deleting the more appalling of our apps but in simply paying attention to the right here, right now.

The thing is, poets have been paying just this sort of focused, careful attention for, well, forever. And they do so not by ignoring the bigger picture, as attending to one’s immediate circumstances might seem to dictate, but by threading the seemingly disparate phenomena of the larger world around them into the specifics of their narrators’ lives. Jennica Harper’s Bounce House and Sarah de Leeuw’s Outside, America serve as exemplars of this approach.

Bounce House consists of 51 poems of equal length: four stanzas of couplets, sometimes opposite each other on the page, sometimes with a line drawing contributed by lowercase illustrator andrea bennett on the facing page. The accompanying drawings are what is usually described as deceptively simple: a string of graduated pearls, a house built not of playing cards but of birthday and Christmas cards. These everyday items are shot through with significance once one looks closer, the drawings performing much the same function as Harper’s verses.

Harper’s subject is her mother’s death, and its reverberations in her own life. This is not unfamiliar territory. Think Michael V. Smith’s memoir, My Body Is Yours, or Steve Burgess’ tragicomic Who Killed Mom? In these works, otherwise diverse, a parent’s demise is chronicled by the writer, her or his grown child. Hospital visits, the witness of a terribly inevitable decline, coming to terms with life without the parent: all of these are the subjects of such works. In addition, if the narrator, as in Harper’s book, is a parent herself, then she cannot help but consider the future: her own child’s inevitable, eventual loss, and the reckoning that will someday come to define their future relationship.

“My daughter’s resting state is desperate to/bounce” begins the first poem, setting the urgency of the child’s restless buoyancy against the narrator’s mother, described later as “bones in a blanket” encountered, shockingly, in a first hospital-room visit. “I’d had plans,” the poet writes, plaintively, entwining love with vexation and tenderness with a quick glance at the time in a way that feels familiar to readers everywhere. Packing up belongings after her mother dies, the narrator reckons with the loss of a life she only knew from the perspective of a child and then as an adult daughter. Anger at the mother who slipped away (“Why didn’t she wait?”) mixes with fierce elegy. A lovely book.

Outside, America by Sarah de Leeuw maps out arguably less immediately urgent, but no less important, daily territory. De Leeuw is an acute chronicler of the physical world, both its natural beauty and the reverse: Found. Behind. lists litter encountered on sidewalks and in ditches, in snowdrifts and under fallen leaves. Her meticulous descriptions— “Unidentifiable. Reminiscent of animal fat mixed with rust. On late winter snow. 5th Avenue. Very early morning. February.” — deliver not only a felt sense of human encroachment on the natural world, our carelessness and haste, but of its own seasonality and decay. These poems seduce quietly, drawing us without fanfare into the view from the poet’s gimlet eye.

Elsewhere, de Leeuw allows an almost waspish sensibility to tinge her otherwise dispassionate observations, as when chronicling the demise of urgent passion in a long-term relationship in Our Different Life. I laughed out loud and read these lines to a friend with partner woes: “your ex-wife, who I understand/more and more.” Ruefully, the narrator continues “I wonder/ when it changed from making love/before dinner to cooking alone.”

There is urgency here too, albeit of the slow-moving kind. It comes in the poet’s acknowledgement of our ill-advised interventions into nature, a kind of grief that comes with deveining farmed shrimp, contemplating the disappearing right whale, chronicling a pulp mill’s extrusion of “[t]ea-coloured chemical/soup” (“Flank”). In the poem What Women Do To Fish, the tiny orbs in exfoliating scrubs journey from shower drain to ocean, with devastating effect on the reproductive cycles of sea creatures. Alive to the complexity of our planetary catastrophes, de Leeuw’s poetry fully inhabits our—and her—complicity.

Outside, America is divided into two titular sections: Outside, suggesting the attention to natural surroundings de Leeuw, who has earlier written on landscape and sexuality in the award-winning Geographies of a Lover, displays here. The second half, America, does not so much shift its focus from the immediate environment as transfer it to others as specifically detailed in poems variously titled after places in the United States. Nature here develops a slow, massive majesty, terrible in its force: tornados, fault lines, wildfires. The poet’s voice loosens, too, her narrator coming undone as she travels the landscape susceptible to such sudden cataclysm: “my raucous mud my mountainside” (from Debris Flow, Snohomish County Washington). Like Harper’s, it turns out de Leeuw’s is a mindfulness worth cultivating.

Bounce: 978-1-77214-140-5
Outside: 978-0-88971-354-3

Carellin Brooks’ debut novel One Hundred Days of Rain (Book*hug) won the Edmund White Award in 2016 and the ReLit Award for Fiction in 2017

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BOOKS:

The Octopus and Other Poems (Signature Editions, 2006) $14.95 1-897109-10-5
What It Feels Like For A Girl (Anvil, 2008) $15 978-1895636-96-3
Wood (Anvil Press, 2013) $18 978-1-927380-64-2
Bounce House (Anvil Press, 2019) $18 978-1-77214-140-5

[BCBW 2019] "Poetry"