FRONTENAC HOUSE
2025/$22.95–$24.95
Frontenac House’s Poetry Quintet 2025 is a diverse array of collections, each offering up challenging questions about relationships to both self and others.
Carley Mayson’s If I Know Anything About a Knife is a necessarily uneasy read. Amid poems of solace such as the couplet stanzas of “Prayers to the Moments In-Between” that list simple redemptive pleasures—“a long walk in the snow, a dog’s nose”—Mayson’s grief also twists her into a “yellow bird… [that] sharpened its beak on [her] wrists and ankles,” her addictions spinning her into rehab. Her eruptive poems leap between lyrics and a haibun, a pantoum and breath-punctuated prose pieces, as the collection rises to that essential healing wound that poetry can be.
In contrast, if you prefer your poetry to consist of sardonic shrugs and insouciant ditties, pick up David Romanda’s Your Lover Stabbed in the Streets, a collection of flat sketches of mostly head-shaking human behaviour. While a few delve into darker realms, recounting the “pink sawdust” in slaughterhouses, or his father, metaphorized into a tree “that claims kites,” others are just crass toss-offs (though I did appreciate the “old writer” lyrics). If you like the minimalism of Rupi Kaur or the understated drolleries of Stuart Ross, then you may find this assemblage compelling.
There’s Magic Here Too: A Trans Woman’s Guide to Being Monstrous, by Skylar Kay, says it all in the title. Poems such as “How to be one of the Good Ones,” “Monsterology 201: Halloween Party, Felix Street,” and “Dysmorphia Redux” excavate painful sites of trans misunderstandings, along with the beauty and relief of mythical transformations as “liquor/ drips” from a centaur’s beard to his “hairy chest’s/ faded incision scars.” Kay plays with Wallace Stevens in “Thirteen Questions for a Dead Dad,” draws on the sonnet and haibun to speak of the liquefaction of borders, the resistance to those who “hate anyone who falls between,” and also uses structures provided by the 8-ball, footnotes and erasure. I guarantee you’ve never read a poem like “Post-Op Ghost Story” that begins: “My vagina is haunted/ by the ghost of penis past.” This is one of the gifts of poetry, so generously able to gather in all forms of life experience and sing fiercely of them.
D.A. Lockhart’s Leaf Counter, the title referring to the winged guide in the Lenape language, laces words from its Unami dialect through this loquacious collection. The site is Prince Edward County, home to Al Purdy’s A-frame house, and the speaker, in conversation with Purdy, Charles Bukowski, Indigenous histories and the land itself, creates a range of paeans and ripostes. Lockhart’s titles are fantastic, such as “Sisyphus Longs for a Smoke at Canada’s Dinosaur Park and Reptile Zoo” or “Eurithe Purdy Climbs to the Moon on a Light Beam to Chase away a Squirrel’s Nest.” But the poems can feel overelaborated at times, a tad talky. The pieces with taut lines and crisp evocations, such as “Revelations about Lilacs at Roblin Lake” (and a host of others), work most potently, as Lockhart asks us to “reckon with/ how revelations arrive” within elegies that are “outpourings of awakenings.”
But of these five releases, juniper, by kerri huffman, may be the most startling of all. These well-crafted poems pay homage to platonic friendship, its urgencies, awkwardnesses, bonds of addictive behaviour and ruptures of unreturned phone calls and Facebook disses. A chronicle of Jeanne’s 49 days at the titular rehab composes half the text (each piece starting with italicized lists of the speaker’s weight, workouts, drinks, pills), while other lyrics incorporate her son, art galleries and stirring moments where “Love imprints itself bodily.”
Each of the collections in Frontenac House’s Poetry Quintet 2025 serves up a variety of investigations into being truly human in the world.
Catherine Owen is the author of 17 collections of poetry and prose. Her latest is Moving to Delilah (2024).
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