Chelene Knight Reviews Jillian Christmas's The Gospel of Breaking and Canisia Lubrin's The Dyzgraphxst

Jillian Christmas. The Gospel of Breaking. Arsenal Pulp Press. $14.95, 80pp., ISBN: 9781551527970

Jillian Christmas’s debut collection of poems, The Gospel of Breaking, is a fabulous ritual, a beautiful coming together of kin. Being so used to hearing Jillian’s work via oral delivery on the stage, it is quite mesmerizing to read her poems on the page and see how she’s played eloquently with the white space. Most of the pieces in the collection seem to act as interlocking puzzle pieces, or like two people facing each other — ready for conversation and connection. With themes of kinship, the body, and family, Jillian Christmas gives us everything we need to piece the entire puzzle together, one jagged piece at a time. She pulls us close to her and then makes sure we all have a seat at her table. A welcoming and generous act.

In the title poem, “The Gospel of Breaking,” Christmas tackles rebirth of self, and the lack of punctuation is a breathless cloud that pulls then breaks apart. 

My favourite piece in the collection is “do not feed” which addresses the stereotypes of Black women. Christmas has gifted her readers with a good portion of self in this book. Through memory, too, we get to follow the steps the narrator has taken. Another generous offering. 

The Gospel of Breaking asks you to have conversations with yourself, with family, and with community. Christmas inquires through her poetry. With repeated calls, she asks us to “tell her,” and “ask her.” She asks us to imagine and to dream. This book is a much needed calling in, and it demands our participation, just like a good community should. What I really love about this collection, is that everyone has to pull their weight to reap the rewards. 

If you haven’t picked up a copy of The Gospel of Breaking yet, please add it to your “to read” list. 

The most amazing thing that happened while reading this book was that with every turn of the page, I heard Jillian’s voice in my head. Now if that’s not a gift, I don’t know what is. 

Canisia Lubrin. The Dyzgraphxst. Penguin Random House Canada. $21.00, 176pp., ISBN: 9780771048692

After reading The Gospel of Breaking, I cracked open Canisia Lubrin’s The Dyzgraphxst and I was immediately transported to a new land, thrust into a new language, new worlds. 

Organized by seven “acts,” the middle spliced with a monologue, Lubrin shows us how far poetry can stretch, and how malleable and pliable the medium. We crawl inward with each act, in search of answers relating to who we are with Jejune as our eternal guide. A big question and theme that I kept coming back to when reading this epic poem was how do we exist in a world? I became fascinated with the “I” and what it really meant. I believe the “I” is meant to shift with each and every reader. Each reader brings their own language to the table and then suddenly shifts, morphs. This “act” is transformative and astonishing at its core. 

What really fascinates me about Lubrin’s long poem is the POV complexities. The speaker changes. Unlike Christmas’s use of the “I,” in Lubrin’s work we are sometimes flung into an unknown atmosphere and asked to fend for ourselves, to figure it out, and I gravitated toward this challenge. 

Lubrin is also a master of code and page play. Things shift in act 3, where everything around us suddenly becomes airy, maybe replicating the dreamlike state. 

The reader has to prepare themselves for the big belly breath of “return #2”: as it expands out and pulls in, it creates a viscous wave of ideas. Lubrin also gives us subtle music here, and the repetition of the word  “of” is melodic. The “returns” almost become instructional. Upon the 24th return we see a glimmer of a solution, hope grows in dream 25 like a chrysanthemum. By return 34 we ask ourselves if we went too far because nothing is recognizable, but we don’t look back. This book is a journey of self.

Together, both Lubrin and Christmas seem to explore their own experiences of and with kinship through various acts. These books, though so different in their own right, hold the reader responsible for their actions which is an incredibly powerful way to engage.

Chelene Knight is the author of the poetry collection Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award, and long-listed for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals, plus the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, and the Toronto Star. Her work is anthologized in Making Room, Love Me True, Sustenance, The Summer Book, and Black Writers Matter. The Toronto Star called Knight, “one of the storytellers we need most right now.” Knight was the previous managing editor at Room (2016- June 2019), and programming director for the Growing Room Festival (2018, 2019), and now CEO of #LearnWritingEssentials and Breathing Space Creative. She often gives talks about home, belonging and belief, inclusivity, and community building through authentic storytelling. Knight is currently working on Junie, a novel set in Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley, forthcoming in 2020. She was selected as a 2019 Writers' Trust Rising Star by David Chariandy.