Books in Canada Review for Evie Christie's Gutted
Books in Canada
Evie Christie's Gutted is violent; the reader is frequently confronted with images like "blood-slick knuckles," or "brain matter and bone fragments exploding". Yet the violence remains contained and controlled: it does not take over, never bleeds into the gratuitous or the exploitative. Take, for instance, the "Slaughterhouse Sonnet":
A million smiling Isaacs before you
Stab cherry coin slots into the thick pink collars.
Those who refuse to die, those who twitch, who,
With bloated eye and rancid hoof, take their time
In dying, will of course be shot in the face.
When you've been here as long as you've been,
They give you the company stopwatch:
Chain link vest, glove, glove, coveralls, light
Jog to station B and a piss takes 15 minutes,
Anything beyond and you're docked. Don't even
Think about a quick jerk for Christ sake, do it
On lunch or on the fucking drive in and you
Know for damn sure there's a God who's given such
Glorious freedom, endless vistas of blood and bone.
Not a textbook sonnet, perhaps, but an astonishing poem embodying all the qualities that make Christie's debut collection remarkable: her unabashed, tell-it-as-it-is poetic voice, deft handling of sensitive and shocking subject matter, precocious use of repetition, disregard for taboo, and her empathetic eye.
Christie gives us narratives of a contemporary urban environment: glass and steel and metal twisted in a bus wreck, desperate people driven to bar fights or suicide, domestic and drug abuse, "Porn Stars and Pharmaceuticals", and the scars left by love. The book jacket claims "this is essentially love poetry"-fair enough, but it is the kind of love that keeps "legs pinched together against buzzing schoolroom/ busy-bodies," the love of "the doctor who slipped it in first (without the glove) and winked." Many of the titles imply Christie is forging a new definition for love: "Not a Love Poem", "Reckoning a Different Kind of Love", "Zombie Love".
One of Christie's most unique talents is her use of point-of-view in these pieces, her ability to shift her speaker between not only male and female perspectives, but any range of experiences contained therein. Men who ogle barmaids, take mistresses, get into bar fights, lose wives, and women who cheat, are cheated on, see unscrupulous psychiatrists, move to the city, marry carpenters-all are treated with the same respect and grace, and rendered with the same precision and raw veracity. And none is spared the scalpel of Christie's wit and insight.
The only time Christie disappoints is when her drive for concision forces her more personal or character-based poems into hard-to-decipher narratives. To be sure, certain of these confessional poems are brilliant: "Letters Addressed to 745 Palmerston Avenue", "Sweet Revenge", and "I Don't Know, It May Just Be the Weather" pose no problem for the reader and offer tender but unflinching looks at leaving and returning home, dealing with family, and loss-themes to which anyone can relate. Likewise, the love poems addressed to an unspecified second person, as in "Reckoning a Different Kind of Love":
Not love at all really, but I spent hours
and months drinking gin or beer on your balcony
into daybreak. I wouldn't tell you how your posture
and stride reminded me of my father's, or the cool,
ritual way a heart can beat, knowing what is not right,
what it doesn't want, and beat again.
Other poems, however, delve so far into one individual's experience that, in their private details, they shut the reader out; "Picking Up My Brother on the Way to Hastings", "Riding County Road 3", and "Twenty-Fifth Birthday Suit", for instance, do not offer enough clues nor broaden sufficiently in scope to be accessible.
That said, Christie's craft never disappoints. She is at her strongest when she uses repetition; for example, the way she can repeat "I am afraid" in three stanzas of "This Is a Picture of Us" and make it always seem fresh and new in meaning and appropriately beautiful in sound. Her sense of line is exquisite. One notable departure from her standard free verse is "Zombie Love (Haikus)"- a series of haiku poems which are simultaneously macabre reflections on love and heart-felt tributes to zombie flicks. Christie repeats key phrases and images throughout the various haikus to create a surreal and bizarrely affecting poem. Far from being one of the living dead, Gutted is a refreshingly vital and shockingly vicious first book.
Matthew J. Trafford (Books in Canada)
Friday, September 12, 2008
Broken Pencil
Broken Pencil Review for Gutted by Nathaniel G. Moore
GUTTED, poetry by Evie Christie
ECW Press
Throughout most of her first book Evie Christie's poetry is masterfully calculating and focused. In "Twenty-Fifth Birthday Suit", Christie manages to catapult us through her origin, her present and future with all the frightful deadpan she later uses in "Zombie Love" which livens up the collection with an unexpected turn and philosophy about Zombie's true appetite. "The properties of loss" evokes road kill, unstable weather and urban atmosphere. "There is a Place in Trois Rivieres" uses synthetic coconuts and its predecessor the synthetic lawn chair and pits them against the raw human experience of these trapped and released memories. These poems are an endearing feat, a peek into the tattooed mental plateau of the artist. Whether its "bones of our habits" or "to wake up alone, corrupt and queasy," these poems are read best in the mercurial way in which they were germinated; discover each one slowly, and stumble upon a nostalgic tomb of depraved suburban love wreck.
The poet is not identified as a "poet" in these poems, which benefits us all. The best thing about these poems is at least Christie is trying and refusing to sustain the stereotype of Canadian poetry, or the retarded image of the tortured and underrated poet. Christie is clearly in favour of torture, poets or otherwise.
In Gutted there are no remains, just dramatic and engaging emblems, sour wafts of cruelty, fully developed abandon and Olympic quality regret, a miserable postcard of a worn-torn life and the confident rejection of hope.
GUTTED, poetry by Evie Christie
ECW Press
Throughout most of her first book Evie Christie's poetry is masterfully calculating and focused. In "Twenty-Fifth Birthday Suit", Christie manages to catapult us through her origin, her present and future with all the frightful deadpan she later uses in "Zombie Love" which livens up the collection with an unexpected turn and philosophy about Zombie's true appetite. "The properties of loss" evokes road kill, unstable weather and urban atmosphere. "There is a Place in Trois Rivieres" uses synthetic coconuts and its predecessor the synthetic lawn chair and pits them against the raw human experience of these trapped and released memories. These poems are an endearing feat, a peek into the tattooed mental plateau of the artist. Whether its "bones of our habits" or "to wake up alone, corrupt and queasy," these poems are read best in the mercurial way in which they were germinated; discover each one slowly, and stumble upon a nostalgic tomb of depraved suburban love wreck.
The poet is not identified as a "poet" in these poems, which benefits us all. The best thing about these poems is at least Christie is trying and refusing to sustain the stereotype of Canadian poetry, or the retarded image of the tortured and underrated poet. Christie is clearly in favour of torture, poets or otherwise.
In Gutted there are no remains, just dramatic and engaging emblems, sour wafts of cruelty, fully developed abandon and Olympic quality regret, a miserable postcard of a worn-torn life and the confident rejection of hope.
Quill and Quire
Quill and Quire Review for Evie Christie's Gutted
BOOK REVIEWS
Gutted
Evie Christie; $16.95 paper 1-55022-710-6, 80 pp., 5 x 8, ECW Press, Nov.
While it's not yet clear whether confession is, in fact, good for the soul (the eschatological jury is still out), one thing is clear: the confessional mode has resulted in a lot of bad poetry. Thankfully, Gutted, the debut collection from Toronto poet Evie Christie, manages to avoid most of the pitfalls and clichés of confessional poetry, despite its roots in the approach.
Gutted is an emotional travelogue, a helter-skelter Bildungsroman moving from a semi-rural girlhood to boisterous contemporary life, love, and heartbreak in downtown Toronto. While Christie occasionally succumbs to too-poetic excesses ("In the Cold Months," for example, which describes "food served from the rare and hoarded porcelain/of grandmothers"), most of Christie's poems benefit from an almost brutal frankness. Christie writes with a plainspoken directness, in largely unadorned free verse that's nonetheless capable of jarring the reader with sudden, unexpected metaphor and imaginative leaps.
The poems here are thematically strong, if formally straightforward. "Twenty Fifth Birthday Suit" shifts effortlessly from a rigorous self-examination to an extended intimation of the speaker's mortality. "Letters Addressed to 745 Palmerston Avenue," meanwhile, charts the slow dissolution of a friendship through the titular correspondence. Throughout the book, Christie deftly captures the violence and victims of contemporary urban life with a cutting verisimilitude and keen familiarity.
Gutted is not the sort of poetry volume that is likely to win prizes, since it largely lacks stylistic daring and formal experimentation. It is, however, a confident and winning collection that will make a genuine connection with its readers – a trick substantially more difficult to pull off. This is the sort of poetry that will actually be read, rather than admired from afar.
Reviewed by Robert J. Wiersema (from the January 2006 issue)
BOOK REVIEWS
Gutted
Evie Christie; $16.95 paper 1-55022-710-6, 80 pp., 5 x 8, ECW Press, Nov.
While it's not yet clear whether confession is, in fact, good for the soul (the eschatological jury is still out), one thing is clear: the confessional mode has resulted in a lot of bad poetry. Thankfully, Gutted, the debut collection from Toronto poet Evie Christie, manages to avoid most of the pitfalls and clichés of confessional poetry, despite its roots in the approach.
Gutted is an emotional travelogue, a helter-skelter Bildungsroman moving from a semi-rural girlhood to boisterous contemporary life, love, and heartbreak in downtown Toronto. While Christie occasionally succumbs to too-poetic excesses ("In the Cold Months," for example, which describes "food served from the rare and hoarded porcelain/of grandmothers"), most of Christie's poems benefit from an almost brutal frankness. Christie writes with a plainspoken directness, in largely unadorned free verse that's nonetheless capable of jarring the reader with sudden, unexpected metaphor and imaginative leaps.
The poems here are thematically strong, if formally straightforward. "Twenty Fifth Birthday Suit" shifts effortlessly from a rigorous self-examination to an extended intimation of the speaker's mortality. "Letters Addressed to 745 Palmerston Avenue," meanwhile, charts the slow dissolution of a friendship through the titular correspondence. Throughout the book, Christie deftly captures the violence and victims of contemporary urban life with a cutting verisimilitude and keen familiarity.
Gutted is not the sort of poetry volume that is likely to win prizes, since it largely lacks stylistic daring and formal experimentation. It is, however, a confident and winning collection that will make a genuine connection with its readers – a trick substantially more difficult to pull off. This is the sort of poetry that will actually be read, rather than admired from afar.
Reviewed by Robert J. Wiersema (from the January 2006 issue)
Prairie Fire
Prairie Fire Review for Gutted
Gutted
by Evie Christie
Toronto: ECW Press, 2005, ISBN 1-55022-710-6, 71 pp., $16.95 paper.
Gutted, Evie Christie's debut, sounds hard-bitten and spat out, but as fluid as any poetry I've read recently. Her skill shines on the wayward, the losing, and those already lost. They receive genuine recognition instead of marginalization or righteous moralizing. From the first poem's ("Come and Break My Heart") first lines,
From your barren cells and basement apartments,
shared accommodations and loveless unions
and not because you mean so much to me.
Come and break my heart because it's rattling and banging,
it's happy candy, this stupid stubborn ruby organ (1)
until the last lines 71 pages later, Christie doesn't let up. The book almost sounds like a verbal assault, but I'm unsure on whom. When the poems are in the first person they sound close and cruel. When she writes of others it comes as a relief. Christie has the swagger of Charles Bukowski, but with depth and conscience, and the extraordinary rawness of Diane Wakoski. Writing in "I Love Alcoholics" she states:
. . . they are so beautiful
When they're drunk that you love them
When they're sober and ugly too.
And they wait patiently for you
To get fed up, for you to leave them,
And if you do they'll love you forever. (4)
Her eye trains on details to reveal this world. "There isn't much to be said about crucifix dappled ditches/ marking the goalies and promising stars we shared schoolrooms with." (12) With this act of saying she blesses their senseless passing and the senseless progress of their lives. They are fiercely her people, and not to be scorned. Our Lady of the A & P "Has no gospel to deliver, / / a Botticellian monstrosity / . . . belly bared." (10) She "[t]akes her time today/ in turning, upwelling a bundle of clothing / and Styrofoam containers/ to ask, What's your problem?" (10)
More than anything Christie trains in images. Back to back to back they couple like train cars as she reveals snapshots a reader can easily process.
In Yorkville a slick black Jaguar sleeps, its mistress eats heavy foods
inside a yellow stucco building, adjusts thousands of dollars
of mammary-
like substance and picks at white teeth. July is for the rich
who'll never drink cheap beer in swollen bars, watch wet quarters queuing
patiently on pool table borders or stick to a lover thigh to hip. (47)
Christie works with subject matters as diverse as exotic cars and breast implants. She makes class distinction territorial and sexually dysfunctional. In her world, eons away from Yorkville's hoity-toity high form beer glasses, the sign at Big Ross's promises these staples: "bread, milk, cigarettes / and fireworks, gasoline and worms" (49). Paradoxically, my one reservation concerns this book's major strength--its relentlessness. After so many beers one more goes unnoticed, or worse, becomes a caricature: Bob & Doug or the Trailer Park Boys. Christie begins pushing when she should be riding. Take us into that world of semen-stained sheets and vomit-spattered toilets, but is there never redemption, even just a lone red maple leaf on a branch against the blue fall sky hung with white clouds? Such a reservation makes me impatient to read her next book's progress. Evie Christie is very good, and I want to read her as she gets better.
Andrew Vaisius
Gutted
by Evie Christie
Toronto: ECW Press, 2005, ISBN 1-55022-710-6, 71 pp., $16.95 paper.
Gutted, Evie Christie's debut, sounds hard-bitten and spat out, but as fluid as any poetry I've read recently. Her skill shines on the wayward, the losing, and those already lost. They receive genuine recognition instead of marginalization or righteous moralizing. From the first poem's ("Come and Break My Heart") first lines,
From your barren cells and basement apartments,
shared accommodations and loveless unions
and not because you mean so much to me.
Come and break my heart because it's rattling and banging,
it's happy candy, this stupid stubborn ruby organ (1)
until the last lines 71 pages later, Christie doesn't let up. The book almost sounds like a verbal assault, but I'm unsure on whom. When the poems are in the first person they sound close and cruel. When she writes of others it comes as a relief. Christie has the swagger of Charles Bukowski, but with depth and conscience, and the extraordinary rawness of Diane Wakoski. Writing in "I Love Alcoholics" she states:
. . . they are so beautiful
When they're drunk that you love them
When they're sober and ugly too.
And they wait patiently for you
To get fed up, for you to leave them,
And if you do they'll love you forever. (4)
Her eye trains on details to reveal this world. "There isn't much to be said about crucifix dappled ditches/ marking the goalies and promising stars we shared schoolrooms with." (12) With this act of saying she blesses their senseless passing and the senseless progress of their lives. They are fiercely her people, and not to be scorned. Our Lady of the A & P "Has no gospel to deliver, / / a Botticellian monstrosity / . . . belly bared." (10) She "[t]akes her time today/ in turning, upwelling a bundle of clothing / and Styrofoam containers/ to ask, What's your problem?" (10)
More than anything Christie trains in images. Back to back to back they couple like train cars as she reveals snapshots a reader can easily process.
In Yorkville a slick black Jaguar sleeps, its mistress eats heavy foods
inside a yellow stucco building, adjusts thousands of dollars
of mammary-
like substance and picks at white teeth. July is for the rich
who'll never drink cheap beer in swollen bars, watch wet quarters queuing
patiently on pool table borders or stick to a lover thigh to hip. (47)
Christie works with subject matters as diverse as exotic cars and breast implants. She makes class distinction territorial and sexually dysfunctional. In her world, eons away from Yorkville's hoity-toity high form beer glasses, the sign at Big Ross's promises these staples: "bread, milk, cigarettes / and fireworks, gasoline and worms" (49). Paradoxically, my one reservation concerns this book's major strength--its relentlessness. After so many beers one more goes unnoticed, or worse, becomes a caricature: Bob & Doug or the Trailer Park Boys. Christie begins pushing when she should be riding. Take us into that world of semen-stained sheets and vomit-spattered toilets, but is there never redemption, even just a lone red maple leaf on a branch against the blue fall sky hung with white clouds? Such a reservation makes me impatient to read her next book's progress. Evie Christie is very good, and I want to read her as she gets better.
Andrew Vaisius
Gutted at Stamford
World Literature in Translation: Global Poetries Today
ENGL 227W
Instructor: Lattig, Sharon
T - Th 9:55 pm - 1:10 pm
In this course, we shall enjoy some of the most remarkable contemporary poetry that is being written throughout the world. Defining "contemporary" as the period from the 1990s to the present], we shall wander into the poetry scenes in international centers like Dublin,
Belfast, Mysore, Mexico City, Capetown, Sydney, New York, Krakow, London, and Paris in order to examine and to compare various national poetics. Our journey will bring us into contact with major poets such as John Ashbery, Wislawa Szymborska, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, José Emilio Pacheco, A.J. Ramanujan, and Kevin Hart, relatively unknown figures such as Sinead Morrissey, Jennifer Maiden, Gabeba Baderoon, Evie Christie, David Morley, Jean-Michel Maulpoix, and several newcomers. We'll debate the degree to which contemporary poets are products of their immediate cultures versus citoyens du monde writing from within a common global environment. The class will be punctuated by a field trip to a reading in New York City or some other local venue, an on-campus reading, and a guest lecture by a critic from Trinity University, Dublin. Poetry not written in English will be read in translation; bilingual students are invited to share original English translations of previously untranslated poetry.
Fulfills GenEd Content 4 (national diversity) requirement.
University of Connecticut, Stamford
ENGL 227W
Instructor: Lattig, Sharon
T - Th 9:55 pm - 1:10 pm
In this course, we shall enjoy some of the most remarkable contemporary poetry that is being written throughout the world. Defining "contemporary" as the period from the 1990s to the present], we shall wander into the poetry scenes in international centers like Dublin,
Belfast, Mysore, Mexico City, Capetown, Sydney, New York, Krakow, London, and Paris in order to examine and to compare various national poetics. Our journey will bring us into contact with major poets such as John Ashbery, Wislawa Szymborska, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, José Emilio Pacheco, A.J. Ramanujan, and Kevin Hart, relatively unknown figures such as Sinead Morrissey, Jennifer Maiden, Gabeba Baderoon, Evie Christie, David Morley, Jean-Michel Maulpoix, and several newcomers. We'll debate the degree to which contemporary poets are products of their immediate cultures versus citoyens du monde writing from within a common global environment. The class will be punctuated by a field trip to a reading in New York City or some other local venue, an on-campus reading, and a guest lecture by a critic from Trinity University, Dublin. Poetry not written in English will be read in translation; bilingual students are invited to share original English translations of previously untranslated poetry.
Fulfills GenEd Content 4 (national diversity) requirement.
University of Connecticut, Stamford
From the book jacket/Blurbs
We can see pattern and form playing with chaos here. Best is when Christie's poems frighten themselves awake into "pastel Easter cellophane and faded fast food hues." It's not shock she's after, but a genuine receptivity—to be gutted by our tawdry and beautiful surroundings.
—Ken Babstock
Like wanderers on a seldom-travelled road between a busy town and pretty one, these poems traverse the difficult distance between far-flung places in the province of love. Along the way, they tell us tales of struggle, frustration, and defeat…but that's not the whole picture. There is also a glint of hope—traces of an irrepressible human spirit, the exhilaration in our bones, both agonizing and cathartic—that reminds us, however fraught with risks, the journey is always worthwhile.
I love these poems not only for their subtlety of craft and clarity of observation, but also because they do not tell us lies about the beauty of our world.
—Paul Vermeersch
From the book jacket:
Gutted, Evie Christie's powerful and harrowing debut, pulses with the rhythms of life, loss, and love. Energized with the language of now and the wide scope of popular culture, while dwelling in Yeats' "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" — a world where needs are unfulfilled and passions unrequited (or worse) — it also manages to revel in the beauty of fragility and discover awe in the smallest things.
Depictions of alcoholism and sex contrast with scenes of contented domesticity; questions of faith stand in counterpoint to the harsher realities of pornography and violence. Lovers, friends, family, and strangers play an equal part in shaping these sharply barbed observations, fleshing out the typically unseen and unspoken dramas of both small town and urban existence.
From out of "an anarchy of conventional process" comes Evie Christie's stunning, original observations — because despite the searing and sometimes controversial themes, this is essentially love poetry — the kind that will leave your "heart plundered, hands lifted, gutted."
—Ken Babstock
Like wanderers on a seldom-travelled road between a busy town and pretty one, these poems traverse the difficult distance between far-flung places in the province of love. Along the way, they tell us tales of struggle, frustration, and defeat…but that's not the whole picture. There is also a glint of hope—traces of an irrepressible human spirit, the exhilaration in our bones, both agonizing and cathartic—that reminds us, however fraught with risks, the journey is always worthwhile.
I love these poems not only for their subtlety of craft and clarity of observation, but also because they do not tell us lies about the beauty of our world.
—Paul Vermeersch
From the book jacket:
Gutted, Evie Christie's powerful and harrowing debut, pulses with the rhythms of life, loss, and love. Energized with the language of now and the wide scope of popular culture, while dwelling in Yeats' "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" — a world where needs are unfulfilled and passions unrequited (or worse) — it also manages to revel in the beauty of fragility and discover awe in the smallest things.
Depictions of alcoholism and sex contrast with scenes of contented domesticity; questions of faith stand in counterpoint to the harsher realities of pornography and violence. Lovers, friends, family, and strangers play an equal part in shaping these sharply barbed observations, fleshing out the typically unseen and unspoken dramas of both small town and urban existence.
From out of "an anarchy of conventional process" comes Evie Christie's stunning, original observations — because despite the searing and sometimes controversial themes, this is essentially love poetry — the kind that will leave your "heart plundered, hands lifted, gutted."
Taddle Creek Recommends, etc
Taddle Creek's Recommendations, etc.
• Gutted, by Evie Christie (ECW ], 2005; $16.95). A lovely poetry debut from Evie Christie, with tales of love, lust, vice, small towns, and jerky travel companions who don't know when to shut the hell up and who should probably apologize.—Taddle Creek
"…I thoroughly enjoyed these works of art, with their raw looks into the human condition.… Again, Evie Christie captures the essence of everyday life that we'd often like to ignore."
— Scene Magazine , November 2005.
"Evie Christie's debut, Gutted, is filled with observations on subjects as diverse as alcoholism, faith, family, friendship, love, and loss. It is a book that showcases the poet's admirable handle on the everyday, revealing the world's beauty without ignoring its darker side.… an impressive first collection, one that should be mulled over. Evie Christie's words should be taken in slowly, first to get accustomed to their bitterness, but more importantly, to savour the richness of their depth."
— PoetryReviews.ca, August 10, 2006
• Gutted, by Evie Christie (ECW ], 2005; $16.95). A lovely poetry debut from Evie Christie, with tales of love, lust, vice, small towns, and jerky travel companions who don't know when to shut the hell up and who should probably apologize.—Taddle Creek
"…I thoroughly enjoyed these works of art, with their raw looks into the human condition.… Again, Evie Christie captures the essence of everyday life that we'd often like to ignore."
— Scene Magazine , November 2005.
"Evie Christie's debut, Gutted, is filled with observations on subjects as diverse as alcoholism, faith, family, friendship, love, and loss. It is a book that showcases the poet's admirable handle on the everyday, revealing the world's beauty without ignoring its darker side.… an impressive first collection, one that should be mulled over. Evie Christie's words should be taken in slowly, first to get accustomed to their bitterness, but more importantly, to savour the richness of their depth."
— PoetryReviews.ca, August 10, 2006
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