Shazia Hafiz Ramji Reviews Billeh Nickerson’s Duct-Taped Roses and Aaron Tucker’s Catalogue d’oiseaux

Duct-taped Roses. Billeh Nickerson. Book*hug Press, 2021. $20.00 CDN, 96 pp., ISBN 978-1-771666-90-9

“When we wrap our legs / around one other / I’m not sure / whose limbs / are whose – ” writes Billeh Nickerson in “Mermen,” the poem that opens his sixth book, Duct-Taped Roses (Book*hug Press, 2021). 

As in his previous work, Nickerson intertwines pop culture, comedy, and queer love throughout this collection to craft dynamic poems that move through a range of emotions. But the opening lines of Duct-Taped Roses set the tone for an enmeshed intimacy that is deeply personal compared to his previous work. Remembering lovers, friends, and his own father who was a pilot, Nickerson’s poems traverse Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, Langley, and the towns and cities of his youth to write “the absence / echoing / with absence.” 

In “Zaccheus,” written in memory of Zaccheus Nice Jackson, Nickerson’s friend and neighbour, the poet recalls Zaccheus screaming to him from his balcony: “I could glimpse the lost / City of Atlantis / in the back of your throat.” The hyperbolic humour of these lines is pierced with sadness and insight a few stanzas later:

The world needs people 
who scream names from balconies, 
who acknowledge us 

for no particular reason 
other than we’re 
seen.

Nickerson’s poems are understated and accomplished, shifting between modes of elegy and humorous punchlines with a voice that is distinct and intimate, recalling the playful, confessional poetry of Dorothea Lasky and the candour of Wayne Koestenbaum. Duct-Taped Roses is Nickerson’s best yet. 

Catalogue D’oiseaux. Aaron Tucker. Book*hug Press, 2021. $20.00 CDN, 68 pp., ISBN 978-1-771666-94-7

Like Nickerson, Aaron Tucker also dives into intimacy with Catalogue d’oiseaux (Book*hug Press, 2021), a book-length poem that chronicles his love for poet and scholar Julia Polyck-O’Neill and that is steeped in a kaleidoscopic sensuality, which makes us see the world anew.

Tucker’s globetrotting poem begins in medias res with the couple’s flânerie: “on polished cobblestones, we wander past sheer buildings / lightsoff storefronts fragrant with Porto’s famous soap.” Often separated by distance, the couple comes together in cinematic locales like Toronto, Porto, Frankfurt, and Vancouver, exchanging copies of Hesse, Plath, and searching for Jeff Wall’s art. Though oceanic crossings and international locales make for plenty of romance, the love in Tucker’s catalogue shines in the specificity of language:

you, afterfeather, you, small beckoning ripples

you, Harvestwoman, “the song’s what you sing”

breathe, then breathing, a waterway under patient bridges

and we rest, holding each other, the movements of the day

Portmanteaus like “afterfeather” and “Harvestwoman” challenge the insularity of romance, reminding us that love demands an expansive, new language and a new way of seeing. Both lovers are at once familiar and other; his “nestpartner” is “at once terrene and celestial,” and they find each other’s rhythm in synced wingbeats: “in which we share a mind, sync vocals / sync orbits sync rivers sync wingbeats, merge.”

Tucker’s language is crunchy, fresh, and unexpected, repeatedly likening the kinship between lovers to non-human kin, crafting an interdisciplinary poetics of relation that marks Tucker as an innovative, shapeshifting writer.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji was the winner of the 2021 Poetry and Prose Prize presented by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, a finalist for the 2021 National Magazine Awards, and a finalist for the 2021 Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry. She is the author of Port of Being. Shazia lives between Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver, where she is at work on a novel.