Jay Miller reviews Eileen Myles' Teenage Whales (2025)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Eileen Myles' Teenage Whales (2025) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Let’s talk about Eileen Myles. Teenage Whales was published in March, 2025 by rob mclennan’s above/ground press.

It is a chapbook of poems, the cover printed on off-buff colour paper, with a charcoal drawing of what appears to be a crown with royal jewels in it floating upon a body of water with the moonlight falling upon it. Myles illustrated it themself.

The text of the chap appears to be written in a typeface akin to Lucida Console, one of my favourite fonts. Although it might not be that specific one, the intended effect is perhaps the same overall, appearing to have been produced by a typewriter, perhaps for a telegram, or on a CRT monitor with a Pentium 4 machine bearing a similarly coloured case, hypothetically speaking.

Eileen Myles is a journalist and poet living in two places, New York City and Marfa, Texas. They have published more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and theatre according to Wikipedia. This is the first time I’m reading anything by them.

I read the first lines before reading any of their bio and knew it had to be the chap I reviewed tonight.

The whole chap is the titular poem, Teenage Whales, which I will excerpt up until the first ellipses (which they space out extra between the second and third dot, impossible for me to reproduce here at this moment in time):

    the birds
    push
    the diamonds
    the reddish
    weave
    of my knee
    Honey’s heh heh
    that shakes
    her belly &
    her back
    it catches
    in the back
    of her
    throat
    ma-ma
    goes the child
    we want
    to go
    what the fuck
    are you
    doing here
    with your
    children &
    a black
    duck dips
    his head
    behind
    a wave
    is gone
    I naming shit
    ripe crest
    darkening
    as it goes
    thun-dar
    goes a plane
    then mumble
    grumble
    I cld
    go down
    & say hello
    yesterday
    when I was
    so morose
    they were
    making me
    glad
    now the tip
    like a dick
    like a clit
    speaks tiny
    shadows
    pouring
    in the sun

This middle section specifically tells so much of the story unfolding in these opening lines: “ma-ma / goes the child / we want / to go / what the fuck / are you / doing here / with your / children & / a black / duck dips / his head / behind / a wave / is gone / I naming shit / ripe crest / darkening / as it goes / thun-dar / goes a plane / then mumble / grumble”

So is the voice of the poem the teenage whale, the ma-ma the child speaks to? The whale is cussed out by the black duck but too self-aware to pay him any heed, admitting slash self-referring “I naming shit” before launching into an onomatopoeia of natural phenomenon, the wave crest ripening, darkening, which then melds into a plane overhead thun-darring, then mumbling, grumbling.

It is very telegrammatic. It is very sound-oriented logic. It tells a story, it presents parable-like animal characters, it has dirty words, it has imagery. It has a lot going on for an opening page.

So much is happening it’s hard to quite tell what the point is, but perhaps the point is disorientation:

    will event
    ually
    tell me
    about Patrice
    Lumumba.
    did he
    pass bad
    checks
    probably not
    that poet
    is the
    CIA
    can’t
    I arrange
    anything
    that supports
    empire
    this beach
    touched
    the shore
    of Mozambique
    Anthony
    Bourdain
    went
    there & ate

This is Myles’ second mention of Patrice Lumumba in the poem, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, assassinated in 1961 after being forced out of office.

Stuart A. Reid put a book out with Knopf in October 2023 called The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination covered in The New Yorker the month of its publication. Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker goes on to describe it as a book explaining how Congolese independence was never given a chance.

I was following current events in Congo for about 3 weeks in April 2024, reading the news about it every day. Cobalt, cholera, control.

Just last month, the agreement signed yesterday by the DRC and Rwanda, was just starting out in the form of peace talks. There was no mention of US-led economic involvement a month ago.

So circling back to Lumumba, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence for a long-lasting ceasefire, when ostensibly, the US is waging a diplomatic warpath to seize mineral resources in every country imaginable, including Canada and Ukraine, by any means necessary.

Even Chotiner in his review of Reid’s book on the CIA topic mentions “the geopolitics of the era were by no means straightforward.” He goes on to narrate:

    By August of 1960, the White House, galvanized by Lumumba’s turn to the Soviets, had authorized a secret C.I.A. scheme to “replace the Lumumba Government by constitutional means,” whatever that meant. The same month, at a Cabinet meeting, Eisenhower made comments that some interpreted as a call for assassination. (Lumumba, Reid notes, “offended his sense of decorum.”) C.I.A.-sponsored protests started disrupting Lumumba’s speeches, and then the agency began scheming to kill him.

[...]

    The question that Reid leaves mostly unanswered is what a different policy might have looked like. What if Eisenhower had shown the foresight that he displayed during the Suez crisis? Lumumba’s death occurred three days before the Kennedy Administration took power, but the hope of a substantial shift by a Democratic Administration proved futile. Within three years, the United States had taken over from the French in Vietnam, and went on to fight its own decade-long war there. As has often been said, the habitual error of the United States during this period was to view nationalist struggles for independence through the lens of anti-Communism, and to turn people who might have been allies (Ho Chi Minh is typically cited) into enemies.

So this critical parsing of history sort of becomes a passing context clue for the meat and potatoes of this line in Myles:

    CIA
    can’t
    I arrange
    anything
    that supports
    empire

The follow-up immediately down below of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, then, paints a scene the dizzying depth of confusion we find ourselves in within the greater context of the last half century of Western imperialism, American exceptionalism, and red scare.

Of course Anthony Bourdain fucking ate in Mozambique. I can hear his voice intoning the country’s name as I write, the imperialism of it rank in my ear, though imagined. This is Eileen Myles in full effect.

The between-the-lines commentary borders on risible, if you’re a fan of dark humour, and is such a deep cut as to show even the shadow in the wound.

The wordplay of “can’t I arrange” riffing off the letters in C.I.A. immediately beforehand is the neat little bow tying this package of verse together. It’s not Eileen Myles who is patently absurd, it’s the state of affairs that they versify, that we find ourselves in.

Taken as a whole, Teenage Whale reads like a telegram presaging the rapture (or rupture) of late-stage capitalism.

Then the title of the poem comes into focus shortly after:

    In a jail
    in Scotland
    I learned
    the young
    whales
    have fashions
    the teenagers
    all like
    to swim
    around
    with a
    dead fish
    on top
    of their
    head
    what a lark

It recalls a recent headline that orcas were spotted off the coast of Washington appearing to wear dead salmon as hats. In the orca world, this is their equivalent to a meme.

Eileen Myles is not one to pass up a double entendre as a segue. And in true Rimbaldian fashion, they continue the next page over literalizing the off-hand remark of a lark into an actual bird.

This work is no less discombobulating than the poetry chapbook I reviewed yesterday. Through Eileen Myles’ astringent lean, severe tone and stark zoological metaphors, however, I find solace. An olive branch for understanding this surrealist farce we call the real world.

We are living in truly fucky times, to quote a recent episode of the Ologies podcast.

Eileen Myles seems to have the edge to perfectly bottle it into this poem and they make quite a wry statement in the process, that results in impact more implicit than tacit, even when you have to read between the lines. I can’t wait to read them again. Thanks for reading.

some author activity: Barwin, Nećakov, Cain, mclennan, Smith + Davis,

Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov have some collaborative work up in the Tuesday poem series; Book*hug Press features Stephen Cain as part of their National Poetry Month spotlight series; rob mclennan has a new poem on the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month; Mahaila Smith is interviewed in the 12 or 20 questions series; and Jordan Davis is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey.

Jay Miller reviews Rose Maloukis' Cloud Game with Plums (2020)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Rose Maloukis' Cloud Game with Plums (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Rose Maloukis is indecipherable, but has rhythm—her poetry must be crackable.

Rose Maloukis’ chapbook opens with a Samuel Beckett quote: Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.

This chapbook is a 2020 pub with above/ground press.

Without jumping to the last page of the chapbook as I usually do, but judging this book based on the perusal of the first several pages, I can say with confidence that these poems delight in the experimentation of form.

The first poem begins with three lowercase O's aligned right and getting one space less right-aligned with each line break before the poem, two tercets, really begins:

    I saw this on the
    sidewalk
    painted white

    I took it as
    a sign of
    song

The next poem begins with three vertical lines, standing above three horizontal ones of half-equal length.

In the background of this review, I am listening to the 2024 remaster of Queen performing live in Montreal and thinking... this is very much a Samuel Beckett je ne sais quoi sort of situation.

“Twitch” and “A Form of Desire” are likely the most significant poems in this collection and I am judging by my lack of instinct on this.

There are also poems that are written out with margin-respective spacing, which is impossible for me to reproduce in this written blog without special research on CSS rules or old-school HTML tags. But pretend it fits the margin of the chapbook page when I reprint it here, as though there are 3-4 spaces in between each word:

    Moved by a small spirit they hover
    parts of completeness incomplete in turning
    the mobile pivots round upon itself
    we see it come & go & turn back again
    make odd patterns against the wall
    is one turn more believable than another
    & see there is a different shadow cast
    when my hand propels the motion

Owing again to the difficulty of printing superfluous spacing in web code, the poem wherein the title of the collection is printed would not appear formatted correctly unless photographed:



It’s not superfluous to me.

Some books I understand the premise of. Some require more attention. Unfortunately, I cannot admit to understanding the premise of this chapbook. But it does, in my headcanon of poetics, fall into the category of machine. This is a different type of mechanism, however, that Rose Maloukis has developed to render this book.

Several pages later she produces this, unexpectedly:



For the unnumbered pages in the chapbook we are provided two hints in the end of the work:

    Page 17, Lines five and six are partially taken from the folk song, “Billy Boy”.

    Page 23, the mandala referenced is Tibetan and is from the Palace of Buddha Bhaisajyaguru. It is called “Healing Buddha with medicinal plants.”

I cannot say I understand everything happening here, but I can, for reference sake, say I am a completionist when it comes to crosswords and sudoku and chess puzzles, but cryptic crosswords don’t speak to me. So suffice it to say, there is something cryptic happening here, but maybe that speaks to you.

All this being said, I cannot determine whether or not Rose Maloukis speaks to me:

    blurbed shadows diffuse car shapes in some damp
    idea of panic that I have seized by touch tight on the steering for
    you or me to pull to the side close by a bird disoriel hung
    in mesh, no nest, crumpled lost depth of field wind wail
    thunder, count, crooked bolt snap, ended edge bland and I
    could see where bird-I stopped and all the rest kept moving

Undeniably, Rose Maloukis writes verse that is statically in motion, like a freeze frame on a VCR fuzz.

I would hate to use the John Ashbery cop-out and say “I like it even though I don’t understand it” but I will say I reserve judgment because I haven’t cracked the code yet. That, itself, is part of the thrill of poetry, sometimes. And Rose Maloukis has it in spades, hence undeniable. Rose Maloukis is indecipherable, but has rhythm—her poetry must be crackable.

Last minute mention: she thanks Sarah Burgoyne in the acknowledgements section.

Spoiler alert to end the review: we have one other Maloukis title on the desk to review, from Turret House Press, by which point... who knows? Maybe we will figure out her method by then. I’m locked in.

Jay Miller reviews Dale Tracy's The Mystery of Ornament (2020)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to review Dale Tracy's The Mystery of Ornament (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of this title, after Daniel Barbiero was good enough to review such over at Arteidolia. You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Dale Tracy is a mastermind of storytelling, daring, and it’s honestly just a really fun, brief read.

Buta, or boteh (the transliteration I prefer), is defined by Wiktionary as “the droplet-shaped motif on which paisley patterns are based” and though this is my first time encountering this word, I get the sense there’s no way the classification of what it encompasses could be so sparing.

But that’s seemingly where Dale Tracy has gotten her title for this 2020 above/ground chapbook from, The Mystery of Ornament.

Skipping to the acknowledgements section first before describing the cover and analyzing the first poem, which is quickly becoming a habit of mine, we read:

Thanks to Allison Chisholm for presenting me with a booklet of blank pages and the instruction to write a chapbook. Thanks to our writing group for making handmade prompts our occasion for being together. Thanks to Stuart Ross for his generosity and keen editorial eye. Thanks to rob mclennan for making space for so much poetry.

A booklet of blank pages was how this book started, isn’t that incredible? It could have become anything and now I am actively reeling my mind back in before going off the deep end into a rabbit hole and subsequent tangent about Persian carpets. Let’s see what Dale Tracy has to say about them tonight instead.

The cover shows a pixelated motif, of flowers entwined between rows of buteh, or bending in such ways as to suggest the presence of buteh without necessarily explicitly showing in appearance. It’s subtle.

I may or may not have consulted another printed source, or three, on this already, but I will spare my tangent for another part of the review, if not another altogether!

    The Design

    The plan: exchange a false chintz for the paisley pattern.
    They’ll steal its basis in the buta, the “Kashmir cone,”
    a motif of tears out of harmony with production’s speed.

    There is no excrescence in art—design extracted
    advantages new owners, not ornament.
    The black market takes textiles
    with the numbers filed off.

    They will steal the general idea,
    the individual expression,
    the fabric, the dyes,
    the elegant suggestion.

    They will unweave.

So this might explain the absent motif on the cover.

By the middle of the manuscript, Tracy has nearly hit her full stride in a pair of ghazals that are as refreshing as they are committed to the theme of the chap.

I may have mentioned ghazals being very much in vogue earlier this month. It’s hard not to get sick of how overdone the form can be. Some poets try to do spin-off forms, inspired forms, etc., but even reading something about John Thompson’s Stilt Jack earlier today made me roll my eyes hearing for the umpteenth time of Canadian poets doing the ghazal. Honestly, I blame Canadians, not Thompson so much, but as a Canadian reader (or as someone who has studied four Middle Eastern languages perhaps), I still enjoy attention to the form, style, history and potent and often untapped valency of the ghazal.

So to recapitulate, Dale Tracy does ghazals justice. She respects the repetition the form yearns for, with an AA/BA/CA/DA/EA rhyme scheme in each. The two make a formidable pair.

But that’s the best part, it’s not the end of the work, it’s the middle, and she’s still getting warmed up.

    A Ghazal Leaves a Clue

    Every plan frays at the edges, leaves a clue.
    You can never know then who leaves a clue.

    Handicraft sews fingerprints in—poems too.
    Facts in delight do not accrue but it leaves a clue.

    Gold threads flowers’ stalks, the mania of growth.
    Spring is here: against the blue, the leaves, a clue.

    A statue gleams against the square of heated stones.
    Sun in the market, but birds flew; shadow leaves a clue.

    The one who looks and weaves is seen and caught.
    D.A.T. Detective Agency, it’s true, leaves a clue.

I say getting warmed up and by that I misconstrue: Dale Tracy, in her trademark experimenting, has also woven us into a narrative about the rug in question in a way achieving a level of nearly indetectable homage to Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, it feels like, or what Krakovian poet Zenon Fajfer might refer to as liberature, or works of literature that interface directly with the medium and printed forms they appear on.

I have only enough time to either excerpt one more poem or exegete. I think I must defer to Dale Tracy on this and print the final one, spoiler alert:

    Return to Sender

    Forced to return the stolen loot,
    Martha remembers sailing wings, and thinks.
    Air lacks pattern like visible waves.
    To make a mark but no trail, take to the sky.

    The cousins wrap the Kashmir shawls.
    The shipping clerk inks the parcel “Air Mail.”
    In the pause before the cousins gasp in unison,
    Martha’s mind stamps signature designs.

It’s a really cool chapbook and I highly encourage you reach out to rob mclennan to specifically request a copy while you still can if any of this scratches that itch for you. Dale Tracy is a mastermind of storytelling, daring, and it’s honestly just a really fun, brief read.

If you’re down to read a chapbook, I can’t think of anything else at the moment I’d rather recommend. I can’t wait to read more Dale Tracy.

some author activity: Heroux, Jenks, Earl, Siklosi, Barwin, Collis, Robinson + Niespodziany,

Jason Heroux has a poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month, as does forthcoming author Tom Jenks, and Amanda Earl; Amanda Earl also has a new essay up a The Typescript; Kate Siklosi is #3 in the Canadian Poets Series over at Peripety and/or Tronies; Gary Barwin has started a substack; Stephen Collis is interviewed via the SFU Department of English website; Elizabeth Robinson has a poem up at Poetry Daily; and Benjamin Niespodziany has new work up on the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month.

Jay Miller reviews Vivian Lewin's Colville Suite for Mixed Voices (2021)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Vivian Lewin's Colville Suite for Mixed Voices (2021) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

I am reviewing this book by looking at the Colvilles first.

Vivian Lewin is a Montrealer transplant from the US who studied English at Oberlin, taught quilting, and worked in communications. She is also a licensed Anglican Lay Reader and spiritual director, which I think is neat, and has published poems in Ariel, Fiddlehead, Field, and Matrix, among others.

This book came out with rob mclennan’s above/ground press in 2021. Each poem uses an Alex Colville painting as a reference point.

These paintings are so well-known, it is sometimes uncanny to look at them in the context of writing a review and realize I will be writing about a poem.

These are the ones I picked:

A woman peers directly into your face with a pair of gradient baby blue lensed binoculars aboard a ferry boat ride to PEI.

Alex Colville's To Prince Edward Island (1965)

The opening and closing poem reference this painting. Due to formatting and time constraints combined, I will skip printing out the first poem as I usually do and merely comment on the vibe set by the opener of the chap.

We are greeted in this poem by quatrains, spaced out on all but the first line to the right, while the poem is aligned left, sort of resembling the seating arrangement of the perspective of the viewer of the painting and its subject.

Vivian Lewin comments: “the woman holding binoculars up to her eyes / and propping her elbows / on a wood bench as if she intends to watch forever – // carries the poignancy of transitory meetings / far from home, at airports / or the courthouse cafeteria / where we outdistance // the push and pull of our lives. [...]”

This is, of course, the famous Rhoda Colville, who was herself a talented artist and poet, as well as the frequent model (when it wasn’t a dog or a blind man) of Alex’s paintings.

Lewin returns to the painting in her closing poem, as well:

“[...] I stare at the reproduction / until I see only / geometry again, perishing / imperfect colours, // less certain than ever (and also now my back hurts). / It’s no different than / what we all do to one another. / So ordinary // that even if you went and stood so close your / eyelashes almost touched / the surface of the original / you might not be sure.”

A black Labrador dog impedes us from seeing the profile of a supine priest on the dock, overlooking the bay with his furry companion.

Alex Colville's Dog and Priest (1978)

This painting Lewin helpfully curates by including an epigraph from Alex himself underneath the title, which reads: “...there is no limbo, purgatory, / or hell for animals.”

In such delicate ways, each Lewin and Colville obscure the holy man with the pagan beast, if I can take such a liberty to compare them comically. Colville is taken very seriously and I don’t intend to crack wise here, either. But as someone with family members who, in the past, were involved with the holy life and one who was a trainer of hunting dogs, and hunter, you do get to form a relationship with canine that is simultaneously holier and more grounded than one might form with any so-called god, you know? That is very much what Colville’s painting speaks to me on, while taking Lewin’s perspective in good faith as someone involved with Christianity herself as she is.

A very famous painting of a German Shepherd crossing a two-lane wooden bridge for trains as dusk descends over the dirt hill in the background. Human presence is implied. The dog looks straight ahead at the viewer of the painting.

Alex Colville's Dog and Bridge (1976)

This painting, Dog and Bridge, has been described elsewhere as demonstrating a “subtle profundity,” and I think that very much applies to both the human and canine scenes common to his imagery.

Lewin, in her sixth poem of the collection, references the above work and its associated studies. Colville spent years preparing for its execution on canvas. To quote the source linked in the paragraph just above:

    The drawing Seeing-Eye Dog, Man and Bridge and its preparatory study (both 1968) were made nearly a decade before the large painting Dog and Bridge (1976). This chronology tells us important things about the later image. First, Colville had been ruminating on this theme and site for all this time. It is the same bridge, the same dog. Yet the drawings were not literally preparatory studies for the painting but rather parts of Colville’s characteristically long, and in all senses measured, thinking process.

Two naked middle-aged adults stand around a fridge at night, the husband (right) chugging a glass of cold milk, carton atop the appliance, and the wife (left), holding the door ajar gingerly, allowing their three cats to approach with curiosity. The post-coitalness depicted is homely, intimate, not gross or obscene.
Alex Colville's Refrigerator (1977)

Lewin is deft in not only her curation of Colville’s artworks, but in responding to them in verse that is as observational and deliberately meek as the paintings themselves. She embodies a transference of the visual medium to the verbal medium with poise and savoir-faire. There is no way to subtly put it, her choices and versification are breathtakingly spiritual and resonatingly sparing. She at once plays curator and visitor in a way that intimates such a familarity with the subject yet ushers you in at the same time.

This is some highbrow stuff, respectfully.

For the final painting above, she writes:

    7. Colville’s Night Kitchen

    Our eyes, getting used to the dark,
    pick out a milky half-moon on the right
    and lower, a man’s most private parts
    not entirely in shadow.

    Here’s life together, when it’s not
    closed away altogether from what we see.
    His refrigerator opens a gash of light
    right down the middle,

    revealing the man and woman of the house
    wearing the slightly heavy limbs
    of statues of gods whose skin
    contains all colours

    as they descend, spilling cold light
    on black and white linoleum
    and on three cats with tails that twitch
    and noses that smell the milk.

Jay Miller reviews Stephanie Bolster's Ghosts (2017)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Stephanie Bolster's Ghosts (2017) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Ghosts is Stephanie Bolster’s fourth above/ground press title. It came out August 2017.

Bolster is a creative writing prof at Concordia with an impressively detailed CV.

I believe Brick Books provided me a copy of her 2011 poetry title A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth in my salad days. Alas, I had a different criteria for which books to review back then, and, intimidated by most, ultimately chose against picking it up at all and donating it to charity.

I have a different modus operandi these days and am happy to say this is the first work of Bolster I’ll be reading.

Many of the blurbs and descriptions of her books seem to defy dictionary definition, and maybe because it’s meant to be obvious. I gather from the title and the opening shot of what resembles a remote Appalachian or British Columbian mining town that this chap is going to be poeticizing a ghost town of sorts.

The photo inside reminds me of Welch, West Virginia, where Youtuber Peter Santenello visited in 2023.

Looking at the Wikipedia article for the town used for the title of the opening poem of the book, Sandon, I see it’s classified as a “near ghost town,” although someone who’s actually been there just calls it a ghost town flat out.

Although I live in Montreal myself, the sort of ghost towns I’m used to are those abandoned one-road-town type places northwest of the Greenbelt in Ontario. I find the ones advertised for Quebec resemble those of BC much more, although naturally each one has its own particular charms.

Stephanie Bolster’s opening poem for Ghosts, then, gets right into things, with a four-page opener including a footnote. She mentions that Sandon was site of one of the Japanese internment camps in 1942.

Curiously, by page three, she’s already deep in the weeds of this poem, writing:

    Sometimes someone chooses
    a use for the empty.
    (Ghosts are not empty.)

The next poem comes with two footnotes, the one on the first page showing the source for a ghost town that went by the name of Bolster.

The thing about ghost towns is that sometimes, info can be so scarce as to make the place out to be nothing more than a rumour or hearsay. Bolster seizes the ripe opportunity to dedicate several poems to the subject so snug they fit like a glove to the topic at hand. She never straight up asks but her verse seems to pose it rhetorically by dint of their very function: why don’t poets talk about ghost towns?

Presumably, a ghost town the author of this chap shares a name with was too good to pass up, so the source is appreciated. It’s copied from the Omak Chronical archives of Frank Emert, who describes having visited the town around 1916, when there were no longer businesses operating there, but a handful of souls still residing:

    My first view of Bolster was on a cold December night in 1916. I had been met at the railway station at Myncaster, B.C. about two miles north of Bolster by J.B. Jones, Chesaw banker. As we rode up the valley behind a fine team of horses in an attractive black sleigh, I suddenly saw many lights from kerosene lamps shining from windows. I asked for the name of the town we were approaching, thinking that perhaps it was Chesaw, where I was informed I had obtained a position as teacher. Then I was informed that it was the town of Bolster. A number of people still lived there but no business houses had been operated there for a number of years.

Bolster very much shows her prowess in long stretches of stories in verse. In each poem, we are spoiled rotten with history, sources, facts, images, places. Brief as this collection may be, we even get a delightful bon mot on dinosaurs as a last word:

    Where did they come from, where
    did they go? That is the story
    we wish to know.5




    5 Jane Werner Watson, Dinosaurs: A Little Golden Book. Racine, Wisconsin: Western Publishing, 1959

I can see myself now, propped up with a jelly glass full of iced tea in an Adirondack chair now, reading this book at sundown on an August day, letting inspiration for road trips permeate through me from her words. This chapbook seems almost exactly crafted for that.

I look forward to encountering the rest of Stephanie’s poetry. These are the sort of poems I wish I had grown up with way back when. Something more appealing reading a poem about a ghost town than any used hard cover with dust jacket could ever give. Thank you for reading.