by Lucas Crawford
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2023/$18.99/96 pp.
Lucas Crawford wrote Muster Points while quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts in March 2020. Most of the poems in his collection naturally dwell on the pandemic and its universal themes: isolation, distance, frustration, desire.
Crawford fleshes out his early COVID experience with many specific details—pacing his Banff Centre dorm room like it’s a prison cell, turning his showers into erotic episodes by fantasizing about being watched, memorizing the names of pasta and taking asinine Buzzfeed quizzes to pass the time. (“My taste in leading men in teen movies of the ’90s predicts how I will die: drowning in Nutella. I’m tantalized to know it.”)
But as the collection progresses, the immediate details of lockdown life give way to memories from his personal history. We watch as his thoughts spiral ever deeper inwards, escaping his dorm room the only way he can. He takes us to moments of joy and pride—a tender memory of pancakes at Denny’s with his mom and a lover, the pleasure of altering his prom gown to use for a drag queen number. And moments of shame and pain—the heartache and longing from a recent breakup, the casual cruelties visited upon a “fat asthmatic… fancy academic” trans boy in a world that’s hostile to all of those things.
Crawford’s poems are infused with sensuous details, his “gastropoetics” concerned with the earthly delights (and difficulties) of inhabiting a body. Each piece in the collection provides steamy references to basic appetites for food and sex: smearing peanut butter across skin, fingering saskatoon pies on windowsills, instructing us to “suck, lick, slurp, gulp—to dissolve dozens of popsicles,” ultimately merging these appetites together in overwhelming desire to taste and consume. Crawford’s poems are hungry and horny, erupting from his pent-up pandemic dorm room with unapologetic gluttony and lust.
These melancholy memories and erotic themes are lightened by moments of scattered silliness throughout the collection. One poem, for example, is just a list of comical self-help titles, such as “How to Achieve Nothing & Not Even Post About How Important it is to be Unproductive.” Crawford peppers his poems with unusual metaphors and images, jerking from sexy to goofy and back again (“arousal inflates like a bouncy castle let go indoors to fill every corner of my rented room”).
Muster Points is not always easy to understand, and sometimes its poems feel deliberately inscrutable, scattered and random. But the collection rewards multiple close readings, and ultimately Crawford successfully uses the universal experience of the pandemic to ground his own specific stories of riotous, lusty, queer desire.
Bruce Cinnamon is the author of The Melting Queen.
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