She, Kirby. knife | fork | book, 2024.
The idea of a “poetry community” is a slippery construct at the best of times, suggesting a unified mass that finds agreement and cohesion. Still, there are places and events that allow a semblance of rare togetherness across any number of divides in Canada: the University of New Brunswick’s annual Poetry Weekend, small press book fairs, and Word on the Street events across the country are all proof of such.
Another example that shone briefly from 2016 to 2022 was the peripatetic bookstore/event space that was knife | fork | book (KFB), presided over by the engaging and energetic Kirby, publisher of KFB Press. KFB was a place you could go for poetry launches and salons and, while there, rifle through the latest from small and micro poetry presses across Canada to see what the poets were doing. At its peak, for a brief time in 2019 and 2020, the shop expanded to include a coffee bar, art installations, and hosted sixty poets over the span of sixty days before the pandemic intervened.
With their dedication to publishing others and presiding over a community space, it could be easy to forget Kirby’s dedication to their own craft. Although the author of a number of chapbooks, their work couldn’t be appreciated in full-length book form until the release of This is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019), the memoir Poetry Is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2020), and this year’s poetry collection She.
She is a testament to life by a poet who is navigating the precariousness of existence at a time when the cost of living has skyrocketed and connections are tested by restrictions created by pandemic requirements. The fragility created by these conditions is captured in a choppy narrative approach that eschews most punctuation and pares down the use of a first person pronoun as much as possible. It feels at times we are eavesdropping on the narrator’s thoughts as they navigate the daily necessities of survival.
The opening poem, “In September, the light changes” (9), is a perfect example of this:
up hours daily
So much is conveyed in this brief, sonnet-length poem. The line breaks begin as statements of fact: “short block today” suggests restraint, most likely caused by health restrictions. Then the line break between “people walk emotional support” and “animals on their phones” leans toward an interpretation of the speaker’s walk itself as emotional support, but also to the absurdity of devices peopled by animal-creatures — perhaps becoming creatures themselves. And “gigantic mums fall” will take on greater meaning later in the book when the narrator’s relationship with their mother is woven into the larger narrative. The moment “wieners everything pricier” points to both the age — a very 1970s way to reference a hot dog — and a sense of fiscal restraint, followed by “can go without,” a stoic moment that resonates elsewhere in the collection.
“In September, the light changes” could stay in this bubble of local angst but Kirby is philosophical, reflecting on their situation compared to others in the world. The dissonance of the line breaks in the final four lines suggests the helplessness and confusion of pondering this greater lack and hearken back to an oft-heard refrain in a certain generation — ”there are people starving elsewhere.”
A pronoun sits at the heart of this book, of course: the title, She. It is printed in all caps on the spine, while the cover features Kirby’s face and naked shoulders staring at the reader. She (but not her) is a pronoun Kirby recognizes as their own. As the book progresses, the references to “she” seem to be referring to the narrator, but at enough of a distance that it could be someone else. The most direct statement in this regard first appears in the poem “Kindness,” when the narrator is addressed as “sir” after an accident (31):
A stranger politely mistaking me for sir.
Mostly, Kirby simply is “she” in the poems, stoic and accepting of self, only commenting in “Dangly Bits” that “she had them // made the most of it.” (35) In a sense, the cover makes the statement, with the poems moving past that discussion. Instead, we get the poet’s quotidian love, friendship, and gracious reach to connect in the world.
The centrepiece of the collection is the long poem “Last Licks,” which is a blunt reflection on the modern world and its frustrations.(49-58) It’s a poem that begs to be read aloud (as Kirby did at Poetry Weekend 2024). Like many other poems in the book, it starts by situating the narrator in place:
Note: eat something (49)
Structured in tercets, the poem allows the energy of the narrator’s thoughts to coalesce as they move through the day, ostensibly planning to go watch a film. But the speaker is waylaid by memories and considerations of the present day that allows form to build, blossom, and swerve into recollections that take in a beloved cat, family, death, even a meditation on grapes.
There is sadness in “Last Licks,” especially when Kirby writes “Everything is harder have you noticed? / Nothing works anymore or it’s a fluke” (55). But any sort of anger or frustration is offset with love, toward which the poem builds: the tender memory of burying a beloved cat, and the love of the speaker’s mother caring for her four children.
Though it runs ten pages, the poem ends with the narrator never having left the house:
On air-fry until they crunch . . .(58)
The enjambment of “No longer imagine. No longer peel” is almost a protest by the time it appears in the poem, more an understanding that there is no longer a self to be invented, no mask to peel off at the end of a day being out in the world that may never fully understand the person you are, or you it. Kirby is just smashing themself into the space that is and biting down on what is.
While KFB exists primarily as a press now, Kirby is still all about building community. The Fertile Festival of New and Inventive Works, an event that had its genesis at a KFB pop-up at The Great Escape Bookstore, celebrated its third iteration in summer 2024 at an event in Dundas, Ontario. Like the narrator in She, Kirby takes to the spaces on the edge where poetry thrives and builds from what is something remarkable and new. She is remarkable too, the testament of a poet who has mastered form in a way that connects directly to emotion, directly to Canada’s shifting cultural landscape.
— Robert Colman is a Newmarket, Ontario-based poetry, critic, and essayist. His most recent collection of poems is Ghost Work (Palimpsest Press, 2024).
