Stop! Look! Listen! Noah Sparrow's Reading Recommendation

   Hannah Green’s Xanax Cowboy is a long poem—a total of 128 pages—that interrogates

   humour and consistently questions what sits at its centre. The speaker, Xanax Cowboy

   (or XC) goes through the wild west (and also creative writing workshops) juggling pills and

   the heaviness of being alive. 
 
   Reading this collection is an undeniably cinematic experience; the writing fluctuates to

   show readers varying degrees of addiction and anxiety. Green sifts through the vulnerable

   and real while balancing XC’s performativity—both online and through questioning

   aspects of gender performance. There is also a question of the responsibilities that come

   through with writing itself, one line I found striking was “How like the poet. To rewrite its

   own tragedy into a comedy.”. Truth is always told unflinchingly. 
 
   There is so much gold that has been dug-up in this wild-west, a personal favourite of mine

   being a cento with lines from Westerns, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, lyrics from Patsy Cline songs

   & the WebMD page on Xanax. All in one piece! Everything about it is not only raw and

   heartfelt, but makes me feel smarter by association. I felt lucky to read from a writer who

   is writing about addiction with such grace and compassion while still refusing to shy away

   from the brutal realities it brings forward. 

 

 

— Noah Sparrow is a Montreal-Tiohtià:ke based writer, currently studying creative writing at Concordia University. He has published political pieces with Monitor Magazine and poetry with LBRNTH. His work consistently deals with queerness and the absurd.