Read This: Iron-on Constellations
Poetry by Emily Pohl-Weary (Tightrope Books)
REVIEW BY Tara-Michelle Ziniuk
A fitting 54 pages long, Iron-on Constellations is a collection of sweet, sometimes stark poems. A DIY tour de force as editor of hip lit zine Kiss Machine and also the Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks anthology, author Emily Pohl-Weary this time manages to locate herself and her work in a city landscape, Toronto specifically, without falling into grandeurs of “urban-chic.” She takes on topics of art, home, hospitalization and isolation from a familiar but fresh perspective. The characters in Pohl-Weary’s poetry are confrontational without being childish or abrasive (even those who are definitively angst-ridden teenagers). Her fascination with the cold and concrete is juxtaposed gently against skies, greens and warmth. Her poems mix classic poetics with an unusual muse: the wallflowers and underbellies of her hometown, which she paints so realistically, then picks the paint off of again. These poems prove that there is something undeniably poetic in the specific (“The neighbour wears bruises to the grocery / We meet sometimes, near the broccoli”). Bringing the observant, sub-cultural, anti-hero voice Pohl-Weary is known for into her poetry debut, readers should expect nothing less: “we can always wear steel-toed boots under the sheets / explode together like paint bombs / whittle away our time, picking at walls and armies.”
