Bookworm, no. 91
Rob Benvie reviews Chris MacDonald’s “Days and Days.” Steven Ross Smith on Jessi MacEachern’s “Cut Side Down.” Liam Rockall reviews Monica Kidd’s “The Crane.” Inside the May issue.
Fever Pitch
Days and Days: A Story about Sunderland’s Leatherface and the Ties That Bind
Chris MacDonald
ECW Press
256 pages, softcover and ebook
With Days and Days, Chris MacDonald has written a scrappy, charming memoir about his awakening to the self-affirming power of punk rock. It’s also a subjective and digressive history of Leatherface, a British band largely unknown to mainstream audiences but praised by a cultish fan base.
In the pre-streaming era, finding new music meant exploring indie record stores and grubby venues. Word of mouth, or perhaps an enticing album cover or song title, could lead to transformative experiences. MacDonald remembers one of those epiphanic moments, when his friend Jason first played him a Leatherface record. It was 1992, and they were high school students in Toronto, stoned in a basement apartment, the music “so good that it almost made me afraid to speak.” The band became MacDonald’s obsession, as much for its assertive sound and barbed lyrics as for the frontman Frankie Stubbs’s caustic persona. “Leatherface is the underdog you find yourself rooting for,” MacDonald explains. “The challenger with fewer wins, but more heart than all of them.” In 1999, MacDonald and his friend backpacked across England, Scotland, and Ireland in the hope of meeting their heroes. As the pair stumbled around pubs and pitched their tent in the forest, they irritated each other yet remained bound by their belief that music (both Leatherface’s and their own) could help them better understand the world.
With asides from notable fans, ex-members, and others in the group’s erratic orbit, MacDonald deftly portrays how punk delivers both liberation and heartbreak. (His occasional lapses into sentimentality only underscore the sincerity of his passion.) Days and Days captures a post-adolescent maelstrom, when a band can serve as a lodestar in the quest for authenticity. As MacDonald puts it, “Truth is vital, and at times sings with unexpected grace.”
—Rob Benvie
Writin’ on the Edge
Cut Side Down
Jessi MacEachern
Invisible Publishing
128 pages, softcover and ebook
In Cut Side Down, Jessi MacEachern’s disjointed imagery and syntax sharpen the metaphorical knife. While “interrogating my relationship to form,” she decides “in favour of formlessness.” The forty-six poems, then, vary from free verse and prose poems to couplets and fragments, in a scattered layout.
The verse is gritty and abrasive—less like political commentary and more like the thrust and parry of a fencing match. MacEachern considers ritual, history, memory, love, and family, most often with a feminist perspective. “In the all-female baths we were goddesses / or many-gendered pages,” she writes. “We were nude / and gleaming. Our wounds. Open.” Elsewhere, MacEachern offers a “fictional autobiography of reading.” She addresses writers who inspire or challenge her, “pledging loyalty / To my viciously whispering muses” (the poets Erín Moure and Lorine Niedecker). Men do appear briefly, including an uncle, a father, a brother—and Joe Hisaishi, the Japanese composer who “conducted our dreams.”
MacEachern’s eye is perceptive, and her “I” is full of tricks. Speakers inhabit multiple personalities, leaping through time as well as identity, with unexpected juxtapositions: “First I was a deity; then, a feral orphan boy; / then, the saviour invented as a lie by the man; / now, finally, I am the matchstick girl of your dreams.” In “Fancy’s Gone Off Her Head,” the speaker confesses that “while the old species’ finale was being constructed,” she “was star-falling & in my foolishness.” The book is a structured collage, with a varied soundtrack of electronic, jazz, and classical—disorienting yet engaging.
—Steven Ross Smith
Getting Out of Dodge
The Crane
Monica Kidd
Breakwater Books
232 pages, softcover
Monica Kidd’s The Crane follows twenty-one-year-old James Anderson, a draft dodger from Wyoming who becomes a journalist for the Daily Standard in St. John’s. Set during the Vietnam War, the novel unfolds a riveting family and political saga.
The story begins in December 1968, with James aboard a train to the East Coast. In August, his twin brother, David, was killed in battle, less than a year into his deployment. The news devastates their father, a Second World War veteran who encouraged his son’s enlistment, and their mother, who quietly opposed it. David’s personal effects include a wooden crane carved by a fellow soldier, along with letters that explain his intention to return the item to the friend’s family in Newfoundland and Labrador. When his lottery number is called, James’s mother urges him to flee. He takes the train to Canada, where he starts a new life and sets out to complete his brother’s final mission.
Kidd balances the reality in Vietnam with the counterculture movements in Canada and the United States. While a letter from David describes a child “white with fear and blood loss and whatever else,” James observes peace protests, “where sons of bankers and daughters of lawyers sat barefooted strumming guitars and eating cold vegan pizza.” Such anecdotes contrast the end of David’s life, in a needless war, with a new beginning for his brother at the local paper, where he finds an “unruly, fist-fighting, sentimental, joyful, piss-taking hodgepodge of happenstance family.” In all, The Crane reads as both an anti-war novel and, amid the current political climate, a bright-eyed reflection on our country’s once-stable relationship with its southern neighbour.
—Liam Rockall
Inside the May Issue
“For more than a century, pictorial maps of various leanings have used the octopus to symbolize perceived evil—to allude to menacing forces that are lurking in the depths or that have already begun unleashing their wrath. More often than not, the inscrutable animal has represented unadulterated avarice, acting as a spineless stand-in for strongmen.” First things first: a note from Kyle Wyatt.
Stacey May Fowles reviews The World So Wide, a debut novel by Zilla Jones.
Kelvin Browne on Living Design: The Writings of Clara Porset, edited by Zoë Ryan and Valentina Sarmiento Cruz and translated by Natalie Espinosa.
And much more!
Days and Days ftw 😉