Your Body Existing In The Future: A Review of Megan Fennya Jones’s The Program By Jaclyn Desforges
May 1, 2023
The Program. Megan Fennya Jones. Goose Lane Editions/icehouse poetry. $19.95 CDN, 80 pp., ISBN 9781773102528
In The Program (Goose Lane Editions/icehouse poetry, 2022) Megan Fennya Jones's speaker moves between two universes: an eating disorder recovery program where "Sad girls in sweatpants / move through the halls" and the world of fashion modelling. As she carries her "heavy book of photos" through the streets of Paris and New York, she also carries her own body, and the space between those things – the speaker's consciousness, her voice and mind, and her physical form – expands and contracts throughout the collection. The Program starts with the words "With minimal effort / I can leave my body" and the promise "I will stay out here / I will make a home out here,” but the speaker's capacity for disembodiment ultimately crashes against her will to survive.
It's hard to write about dissociation – those gauzy, ungrounded (non)experiences – while still crafting poems with somatic punch. Jones pulls this off beautifully, simultaneously grounding her work in place, felt sense and image while using enjambment and minimalist punctuation to form dreamlike poems. Even as the speaker floats up to the ceiling, as in "Paris Assignment," looking down at her own body, the reader stays rooted in sensation. They can taste the straw water, feel the concrete beneath their knees.
Indeed, one of Jones's biggest strengths as a poet is her ability to translate abstract concepts into concrete image: just as the work of the speaker is to ultimately return to her body, Jones works on every page to ground the reader in physicality and sensory detail, giving us the solid footing we need in order to explore big questions about trauma and self-destruction. One of the most powerful examples of this technique is in the poem "Little Foot," which depicts a cat named Grandpa with self-harm behaviours. Hauntingly, the speaker asks:
"Kyla, do you ever ask yourself / what happened? / Why does Grandpa ravage her little foot / in the corner of the room?"
Jones also uses repetition to foster this grounded-yet-dissociative atmosphere. In "A Season In Hell, each iteration of At the café is like a film looping back on itself. With each line break, a new universe appears. It's dreamlike, but it's a manic dream:
"At the café I do not mange / At the café I throw the bread / to the pigeons! / At the café I'm reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty / At the café I'm reading Ezra / Pound"
The book contains both a narrative arc (as the speaker navigates a shitty romantic relationship, a modelling career, and the eating disorder recovery program), and an emotional one – gradually, over the course of these poems, she begins to climb back into her body. This healing process is neither easy nor linear, and Jones succeeds at illustrating its complexities. Kyla, the speaker's caseworker, doesn't allow her to remain on the surface – in order to complete the program, she has to go deep into the despair she's hiding from, the pain beneath the level of symptom. Jones expresses this concept using the symbol of the iceberg, a support group cliché (as in "that's just the tip of the iceberg"), that she transmutes into an image powerful enough to taste:
"I imagine Kyla and I / feeling up the iceberg / in the gloom / Green shimmering slime / oozes from a gaping hole / and I put my finger in it"
Ultimately, the speaker completes the program. She descends the iceberg, sees herself in its green glow. Jones returns to this image again and again, as well as to other motifs such as "the blaze of the eye" (the addictive/destructive camera shutter, as well as its implications as a physical representation of the male gaze), and the log floating on the river (a symbol of eating disorder – something the speaker clings to even as it carries her "downstream to [her] death").
While Jones effectively depicts internal and emotional struggles, the collection also succeeds when it turns its gaze outward – the poem "Joe Blow," for example, illuminates the ways in which men exert their economic power over young women within cisheteropatriarchy, and the predatory/protective dichotomy of that Daddy dynamic:
"He owns the club / so we have to be good / or he won't let us in / He is the only person / we know with a car / I am in his car feeling like / a manta ray / gliding low"
In the second-to-last poem, "It's Happening Again," Jones considers the role that other women in the fashion industry play in feeding her speaker's eating disorder. "I agree with the photographer," she writes, "when she explains my calves are fat". The poem ends with an empathetic nod to the complexity of these dynamics within the wider context of lookism and patriarchy:
"Every day I shed a new layer / and I had been working so hard / to encase my soul in flesh / Is this what Stockholm syndrome feels like? / Maybe / Or maybe this is what happens / when women who are very sick / try to take care of each other"
The Program is a complicated exploration of beauty and trauma. Some of the experiences within this collection were so familiar to me that I found myself highlighting lines on each page, feeling the bright validation that comes from somebody describing your insides better than you could. But this collection isn't just about dissociation or disordered eating, and I don't think you need those lived experiences in order to resonate with it. Ultimately, this is a book about healing, and the human capacity for psychological survival in the face of impossible pain: how brilliant it is, really, that we find ways to keep going, even if it's those strategies that harm us in the end.
Jaclyn Desforges is the author of Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC's picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. She is also the author of Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), which was shortlisted for a Chocolate Lily Award and a BC Young Readers Choice Award. She’s a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of a 2022 City of Hamilton Creator Award, a 2020 Hamilton Emerging Artist Award for Writing, two 2019 Short Works Prizes, and the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.