Jaclyn Desforges Reviews Antonyms for Daughter by Jenny Boychuk and A Small Homecoming by Furqan Mohamed
Jenny Boychuk. Antonyms for Daughter. Véhicule Press. $17.95 CDN, 75 pp., ISBN 9781550655896
“I died to be my mother’s antonym, / but the antonym is never without / that which says you are not me.” In her debut collection of poetry, Antonyms For Daughter (Véhicule Press, 2021), Jenny Boychuk writes with kaleidoscopic clarity about the loss of her mother to substance use. It is a nuanced collection about complicated grief, one that’s haunted by togethernesses and separations — a mother and daughter knit together by trauma, abuse, memory, and inexorable love. “Three nights I’ve dreamed you dead: / once in the bath, twice in your bed,” Boychuk writes in the book’s first lines. The poems that follow are elegant and gripping. Around each corner there are terrors: the book’s motifs include violence, scenes of cruelty, broken mirrors, and drownings. The poem “That Morning” begins with the wind howling and a leaky radiator and then pivots at the midpoint to a telephone call, the italicized line “Mom’s dead.” The poem ends again with the repairman on his knees and the howling wind, except now we don’t know what decade we’re in, and we’re left stumbling forward, as the speaker is, in a world without her mother.
Antonyms For Daughter’s epigraph comes from the poem “Splittings” by Adrienne Rich: “It is not separation calls me forth but I / who am separation And remember / I have no existence apart from you”. Earlier in this poem, which appears in the collection The Dream of a Common Language, Rich writes that the pain of separation is “not simply absence but / the presence of the past”. In Antonyms, the absence of the speaker’s mother is always present. There can be no separation without a strange kind of togetherness. This is reflected in the dreamlike clarity of “Errands and Preparations,” in which the speaker goes shopping with the ashes of her mother: “I carry you outside in an antique biscuit tin, / nestle you carefully on the backseat…. how lucky / that on a summer day like this, you’re already ash, / and can’t burn further, can’t become less.”
Furqan Mohamed. a small homecoming. Party Trick Press. PWYC. 31 pp., ISBN 9781990478
As in Antonyms, Furqan Mohamed’s collection A Small Homecoming (Party Trick Press, 2021) explores the togethernesses and separations of daughterhood, though Mohamed’s work is rooted in an examination of joy rather than grief. A combination of poems and personal essays, A Small Homecoming is an ode to the poet’s Somali heritage and community. In her poem “Somebody Else’s Harvest,” Mohamed writes: “I have never been alone. I am not self made. / I am the sum total of everyone who has ever cared for me / or taught me anything.” Mohamed’s poems and essays are as bold and lucid as they are intimate, exploring themes of racism, colonialism, gentrification, and family pressures. In “A Love Letter to Eldest Daughters,” Mohamed writes eloquently about the multiplicities of her experience: “To be the eldest daughter of immigrant parents is to be the hope for the future while somehow abiding by rules created by our parents’ worst fears….The title of eldest daughter will always be heavy, but I like to hope it won’t be heavy for long. I dare to save some pieces of myself, for myself.” Sense-images of joy and connection are threaded through the collection — cups of good coffee, black spice powder, henna on a grandmother’s hands, the sounds of a full house. Mohamed consciously centres these images of “real and abundant people” leading “full, radiant, and beautiful existences” in response to a cultural canon that is so often focused on depictions of trauma. “There is something incredibly disturbing about walking into mostly white rooms and seeing that the only Black or Brown art being praised is the art that depicts the most pain,” Mohamed writes. “I know what I’m writing, and I know that stories about simple pleasures are just as powerful as war stories – and can sometimes be revolutionary.” Just as Boychuk brings grief into sharp focus with weighty, close-up images — a cold egg, nine black dresses, thorns — Mohamed invites the reader into the intricacies of connection/disconnection by drawing on sense-memory and imagination: dancing, a cleansing fire, the view from a beast’s tongue. Pleasure and pain, presence and absence, separation and connection, and all emotional gradations in between — these collections make ample space for complexity as the authors translate their lived experiences of daughterness into poems that are subtle, complicated, and unsparing.
Jaclyn Desforges is the author of a picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), and Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press, 2021). Jaclyn is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices award, the 2019 Hamilton Public Library Freda Waldon Award for Fiction, the 2019 Judy Marsales Real Estate Ltd. Award for Poetry, and a 2020 Hamilton Emerging Artist Award for Writing. Her first chapbook, Hello Nice Man, was published by Anstruther Press in 2019. Jaclyn’s writing has been featured in Room Magazine, THIS Magazine, The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Contemporary Verse 2, Minola Review and others. Jaclyn is currently writing a collection of short fiction with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts. She is an MFA candidate in the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.
Follow Jaclyn on Twitter @jaclyndesforges and on Instagram @jaclyndesforges