Shameless Self-Promotion: The Astronaut’s Wife by Lorette C. Luzajic

A wise man once said that the only certainties in life were death and taxes. I figured it would be incredibly boring to write a poetry collection about taxes, so I went right for the jugular. I tempered the morbidity with love, that other madness. What kind of poet doesn’t include a few love poems?

This was the official marketing blurb: Love and death have been on this poet’s mind for some time. This poetry maps a few of her most intense experiences, accentuating the positive, the unusual, and the lost. With a unique voice and lively wit, a sardonic twist, strength, and a peculiar resolve through melancholy, these words lay bare her soul. Luzajic believes in exploring the frontiers of the universe, its chaos, its beauty, its small kindnesses, its remarkable spirit. Along the way on these adventures, you sometimes have to say goodbye.

If you are one of those rare gems who constantly reads poetry, you won’t want to miss the “rapier wit” in these poems that ring with “authenticity and truth”. (Hey, I didn’t say it! Those are two of hundreds of positive comments. Not all were positive. Some called my work self-indulgent. But Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, called them “imaginative, witty, and profound.” You decide!) Many of these poems were published in literary magazines like Modern Poetry, Caffeine, White Wall Review, Rattle, Grain, The Fiddlehead and so on. On top of all this, the book looks damn cool, too, thanks to the unbelievable artwork of Iaian Greenson (www.iaiangreenson.com).

If you never read poetry, take a chance on me and treat yourself to The Astronaut’s Wife. Join me in surprising adventures, and meet some characters you won’t forget. But hey, don’t take my word for it: here’s what other people have to say!

I get poetry from readers once in a while, but I never want to read it. Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy. I like them and thank you for sending them. Looking forward to the next book.

Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Soul Mates

“This Girl Can Write indeed! The Astronaut’s Wife – Poems of Eros and Thanatos establishes Lorette Luzajic as a rising, multi-talented poet on the Canadian scene. Her insights into the heights and depths of our common human struggle to live out our own often-buried divinity hold the ring of authenticity and truth. Weep, laugh, enjoy!”

Tom Harpur, bestselling author of The Pagan Christ and Would You Believe?

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

We got the book. Thanks. I don’t know how to properly reciprocate when a writer puts that much of herself on the page. I’m not sure how to honour that. The book treads holy ground, sometimes with a holy rawness and sometimes with unholy eloquence. The last two stanzas enter a whole other realm.

Will Braun, editor, Geez Magazine, Winnipeg

Each time I feel that I’ve found a favourite poem, I turn the page to find myself tempted by another. Valium for Breakfast, A Poem for B and November keep on drawing me back for another read. Wonderful…powerful…thoughts that make me gasp out loud, laugh or blink back tears, all in a few words or stanzas. Thank you for sharing this beautiful gift with me.

Bonnie Staring, editor, www.womencandoanything.com

I am a great fan of your work. My friend used to go on and on about a line from one of your poems “the quiet raging ocean of my messed up heart” before I’d ever read it. He was actually the one that gave me your book. But I found so much beauty in your words, and I felt so inspired no matter how many times I read it. I appreciate so much what you’ve done and the way you felt…The depth in which you write is so amazing, it’s so much more than anything out there.

Through your writing I love the way you live, love the way you love, your heart is so truly unique. Reading your poems brings me the feeling I get on the days that I am in love with the world and I can feel everything.

My best friend in the entire world had the kind of beauty in his heart that I see in your poems, and it brings me back to the feeling that he gave me of someone who was meant for a better world. Unfortunately he died two years ago, and I think about your poems and other sorts of things that he would appreciate as well, and it’s so amazing. I haven’t been able to put it all into words. I would read your poems when I missed him or just felt like crying and it was sort of like a companionship like coffee and nicotine…..I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but I want to thank you for your inspiration.

Stephanie Nord, Georgia, x-ray technician

I n writing this book, the author has, like a rock through a mirror or a beer bottle on the sidewalk shattered her life. You read one of her poems and know exactly what she is writing about. Each is a part of the story of her existence.

She has experienced life like few others would dare. You picture the smells and sounds as well as the sights, but you do this shard by shard. The whole is made up of the shards, yet there is something both more and less to the ‘big picture’.

This is not really a book of poetry; it is more of a memoir. It sometimes uses a poetic form, but mostly not. A few of the poems are a little self-indulgent, but most of them have a brutal, scary honesty. I read this collection two months ago and only now understand what I think of it.

Alexander Burns, criminal lawyer, Burlington, Ontario

The Astronaut’s Wife is a complete lifetime of emotions all splashed helter-skelter across a few dozen pages by a woman who clearly understands them all. This clutch of lyrics seeks out your soul and enriches it with warm, peaceful feelings, and then rips it out with raw, unquenchable anguish. With mythic imagery and erotic undertone, the author carries you on a journey through her own experience of the unending pathos of life and death. Don’t miss it!

Stu Blyde, Threading Machine Set-up/Nipple Manufacturer, Zurich, Ontario

I knew when I was 20 years old that I was the best young writer in Canada, no – pardon me – the world. I felt this in my bones, in my marrow. I had a chip on my shoulder, greasy hair and a brand new Smith Corona on my desk. I even had a working title for the great Canadian novel I was about to write…

Suffice it to say that Lorette’s writing made me feel embarrassed by everything I had ever written. She was Jack Kerouac…I only had the cuffs of my jeans rolled up. Lorette was a blues record that I owned on CD… Novels, short stories, poetry…Lorette was the master of her domain…And I wouldn’t be lying if I told you that she was one of the people who taught me how to write.

Iaian Greenson, writer and artist, Toronto, Ontario

Few of us have had the horrid misfortune of experiencing the death of a multitude of friends, family and acquaintances at a young age. Even fewer have had the blessing and sometimes curse of encountering a lifetime of pivotal events by the time our odometer rolls past 30. Only one person has met and conquered both with the mastery, elegance and savoir-faire of the written word. This person is Lorette C. Luzajic. Lorette is of the most talented, diversified, and multi-faceted writers I have had the pleasure to read. The Astronaut’s Wife is a catharsis for all who have had to endure the loss of someone who has left this world too brave, too loved, and too young. This is a read for people like myself who often find ourselves having to ‘buck up’ when we really should be soaked in tears. It offers a confidant with whom you can find the emotions that need to be expressed, written in words that know you, sit beside you, and hold your hand as you move past pain. However, if you read closely, friends, you will find bits of rapier wit dancing below the surface of even the darkest lines. Also inside are poems that are an old friend reliving memories of times and places that perhaps you have also been to. If not before, Lorette takes you there now. Mainly, this is the kind of writing most aspire to, but never achieve. The Astronaut’s Wife reaches past heart and soul and into the place that you never reveal, sometimes even to yourself. I await Lorette’s next work and the further unveiling of this great talent to the world.

John Bennett, chef and restaurateur,Toronto

The author poignantly claims in one of these collected poems that she “looked straight into darkness to see a starry night.” Indeed, Lorette C. Luzajic has had some highs and lows and she bares them openly in The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Without lowering her gaze, she lets you look straight inside of her and you may flinch before she does.

The Astronaut’s Wife- a poetry book with one of the most amazing cover designs by painter Iaian Greenson – takes its title from a mediocre movie of the same title, but of appropriate melodrama and a good cast. Luzajic borrows to suit her whims frequently, not because she isn’t wholly original – she surely is – but because written, visual, musical and cinematic culture are mainstays of her palette in both her mixed media paintings and in her writing. Guest appearances from all walks of high and low culture may or may not be recognized by her readers, but add layers of depth at every turn. In this case, the title is a perfect fit in keeping with the poet’s grim and steady gaze into the dark skies in search of that Van Gogh-ian glory. Much of her work resonates with this balancing of dark and light, and here the intensity of irony and sorrow shines forth straight from the title. For the book is dedicated to her late husband, who lived the philosophy of psychonautism and then died from it. For the exploration of unknown frontiers can and does lead to death, but still the poet seeks in this collection to know them.

And if the borrowed cover title sums it all fittingly in the poet’s personal folklore, the last poem The Astronaut wraps it all up with a bit of an homage to Dylan Thomas. How dare you go so gently into that good night, she says last of all.

The journey through love and death is harrowing but an amazing resilience shines through creatively as the poet takes you into her psyche. She reveals the kind of betrayals in love that many of us have endured, prying apart their layers with intuition and wisdom. In Prison Blues, she laments the fall-out of a beautiful relationship ruined by control issues. “And yes it’s easy on a Sunday to miss you,” she admits, “the lonely chill of frosty daylight feels sentimental, and does not recall how we wrung each other into total emptiness.” She expresses her fears, wondering if anyone will ever “reach for me the way you reach for me.” Without holding onto anger, she acknowledges the possibility that no one’s “intention is to hurt another – love simply longs to possess another, to keep them with a jailer’s hands.”

Other works show a more cynical and bitter edge toward love and its “quiet scars and gaping maw” (Valium for Breakfast) but the poet still retains in these furious expressions a sardonic sense of humour. “Since you asked,” she writes, “I’ll tell you what has become of me…I’m fat, and work as a cashier, just as Satan promised me on Highway 61.” (That’s a somewhat obscure reference, by the way, to the great Canadian film Highway 61 – there is a scene where Satan tells a poor little girl with big dreams that she isn’t going to be famous, she’s going to be fat and work as a cashier.) But just when it appears that Luzajic might be feeling sorry for herself, (forgivable, I think, for in matters of love we all have those moments) suddenly, she is tough and beautiful and reflective: in Damage she tells us she can’t be sure “he is prepared for the life of a poet, for the rain soaked rooms her soul hides.” And in Untitled for A. she says confidently that she has been many things, from starlet to ghost to artist to lover and that she “was never all those pieces you could not pick off the ground.”

Eros is perhaps a loose interpretation because while many of the poems are erotic or about romantic partners, some of the most powerful are about family, and in fact Luzajic has dedicated the book to her husband, father and brother, the men who have, she says, made her who she is. The most stunning pieces in Love are those that open and close that section. In my brother shows me easter, she turns looking at the moon through her brother’s telescope into a visionary experience we can all share. And the piece that closes the first part of the book is a ten-part poem about family experience, bridging the themes nicely with a last line that refers to love and life as a complicated thing that can easily be simplified – in the end, it is only ashes after all.

It would be unfair to give too much away from the Death section of Luzajic’s poetry. For here, the artist’s soul is tortured by loss, and it is expressed so beautifully that the reader can’t help but cry. The poetry seems to contemplate the dead in all ways with unbelievable eloquence. There’s murder and mayhem and methamphetamine, suicide and AIDS and cancer. Yet something of that starry night shines in each poem, words that comfort and heal even as they mourn. The poems are very personal and yet one gets the feeling that they are written on behalf of everyone, for death is the only truly reliable fact of life.

Melissa Hennessy, writer, Toronto, Ontario

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Year of the Rat (Rediscovering Queen Crosbie)

I’ll tell you a small detail about my madness. I’m obsessed with magical signs. I see them everywhere, and it is what I love most about my life. Without ethereal, impossible, beautiful synchronicity, life would be meaningless and cruel. It doesn’t matter to me if that’s ‘real’ or not. It is what I do to keep my psyche alive. And so, you see, I have ‘fun with fate’ games, small, pleasant, harmless rites that guide me along my discovery walks. These games of mine make connection out of random, disparate things.

So this is all how it came about that I’m rereading the amazing Lynn Crosbie’s Queen Rat. I noted that this is New Year’s Day for Year of the Rat. The Asian astrology system says we each have traits or lessons to be found in our year of birth’s animal, and by chance this year’s animal is the same as the year I was born.

My interest in astrology is fleeting and my knowledge limited, but like many curious, I check my magic signs and numbers to see what they have to say about me. I picked up Queen Rat to honour in some small, random way the New Year for my sign. There was no connection in this tiny ritual except the word “rat” but the way I roll is this: “in the beginning was the word.” I believe in incredible things.

It’s no small feat to write a book that Al Purdy calls the best that year. I will tell Lynn now that this was one of the books we yapped about over endless coffees or a hidden mickey of Silent Sam. It was the kind of text that made me jealous, but in a good way, the way this woman never ran out of the right words. And the book was filled with those favourite morsels I love- signs, details, ghosts of people I’ve lost and found, wandering the places we’ve been.

I recall an era where I sipped endless tea refills at the Golden Griddle in the middle of the night, sitting with the tired waitress and the tired drag queens. The days where we bent over a congealed cold plate of potato puffs and talked about the end of the world. Those were also the days we crawled Kensington Market, the days we walked miles from Queen and Niagara out past what is now trendy Leslieville. It’s the era where we would peer in dusty antiquarian bookshops and not have any idea in the world where we were heading. Those were the days of drumming circles and wimmin’s events and the peace camp and the fetish clubs and the LSD. The bygone days of dressing like Girl George and smoking like a chimney at vampire clubs.

It’s amazing to sift through a poem like James Joyce Pub: “we find an abandoned grocery cart and push Michael fast and let go.” Once in a laundromat in Kensington, Japey thought it would be funny and alarming to other patrons if he went into the dryer with half a dozen oranges. Just for a few turns. I don’t know why I’m thinking of this now, but now that he’s gone, I treasure every random memory of Japey. And following that poem that gave me that small, fragmented gift of recollection, is one called Kensington Market. In these poems, we are witnesses. Here, we witness this: “I stare him down; we gather her things, barrettes and beads, a little purse/chenille bedspread, /and look at her: the girl’s face is diamonded with bruises….” Then, “like cat’s teeth, tearing rotting flesh, to subsist; she turns to him/….opiates she knows are tender, hard, familiar with this alchemy…”

And so it is that I begin this new year astonished and inspired. The words flow so beautifully together that it’s torture, nearly. Listen to this one:

“Priscilla arched her back and hissed when I brought
him home, her black fur rising like garter snakes.
Two little ones are double trouble,
but when I saw them kids take a knife to him,
my hands flew into the air like I was catching a moonstone.
He trembled against me, and I told him, All your trials soon be over.
Singing it some: his tail beating like a little white scarf,
caught in some king’s fingers.”

Poem after poem transports me. Remember this? Amaryllis, which starts by taking your heart right out: “You can’t miss me, he said, And I waited for him at the long wooden table.” “The beauty that does not die at the centre of his terrible stories.” “The day he left, we looked at one-eyed fish in the leaden stream. The/air was sleepy, as sultry/as the silk-red amaryllis.”

Words really are magical, words in poems, words in songs, words like let there be light. From Allan Gardens, 1994: “He disliked Daniel’s fiction and I disagreed. He told me a photograph of/the two of them together had fallen from a book the week before he died, which troubled him.” Signs and portents are everywhere, see? Then, “The spring that silvers your bones” and “there is a frail banana tree” are two other nuggets among a hundred in this piece.

It’s no coincidence to me that the word “story” is scrambled inside the word “astrology.” The world is a puzzle- and the word “word” inside of “world” is a piece of that puzzle to madwomen like me.

Listen:

“Though the Western rat is reviled as little more than a bottom-dwelling disease carrier, this animal is viewed much differently in the East. The Eastern rat is revered for its quick wits and its ability to accrue and hold on to items of value; rats are considered a symbol of good luck and wealth in both China and Japan. Clever and quick-witted, the Rat of the Chinese Zodiac is utterly disarming to boot. Possessed of excellent taste, this Sign flaunts its style at every turn. Its natural charm and sharp, funny demeanor make it an appealing friend for almost anyone. The Rat likes to know who is on its side and will treat its most loyal friends with an extra measure of protection and generosity.” (Chinese.astrology.com)

The rat, a fascinating character who is part of the ‘the real world’ and part of the underbelly. See, the rat is nothing to fear- as his child, I never have. In 2008, we must all meet and mingle with the rat. It’s his year.

That rat wears a long, tailored coat, waisted, but masculine, Matrix-like. This maze is populated with real characters, for the underworld is in our midst and not all that “under” after all. These things are all real, folks,: cities of the broken and the fierce, nearly universal. If anything else, the rat does not pretend he is not a part of the maze. He does not dismiss the crazy and the downtrodden as if they don’t exist.

I’ve lived in squats in New Orleans with ruffians of every ilk, made love in the dirt and there was nothing like it. I’ve climbed strange landscapes in New Mexico. It was so cold when we got there that it was snowing. Some crazy turquoise-wearing white healer type sleazebags guided us, fancying themselves gurus, but maybe in a small way that day, they were. I’ve spent a fare share of time in the lowest of the low, literally, Canada’s poorest postal code. I drank beer in those sullen saloons, like every other nutbar hippy in Vancouver, and I might do it again. I sampled rice wine with a Native Canadian homeless addict named Joker, and we were ‘friends’ until he froze to death one winter, according to his pal. I’ve spent most of my dancing life in Madonna’s beat, and delighted in the brilliant madness of some crazy club kids. I’ve read the poets while in the gin mills of Atlanta, deciphered symbols, more signs that you would not even believe.

Rock stars, oil tycoons, graffiti lords, unheard of writers, ex-cons, old-school arcades bristling with truants, jazz singers, the brokenhearted… The rat is nothing sinister, after all: he simply exists in reality, which is always both fabulous and grim.

I’m not sure I could find the words to describe how it felt once upon a time to be young and wild and literary in Toronto, but Lynn Crosbie sure did. The world really is haunted. Only a fool can deny it. Crosbie has the rat’s ability to navigate dangerous places, and shares his fascination with the underbelly. Her poems are at home in a place of addicts and karaoke and the murky minds of serial killers and whores. It’s the vastness of human history’s ineffable longing. It’s the world where dangerous poets and painters drink whiskey in parks and describe angels and demons. And Lynn Crosbie, here in this guise, is absolutely their queen.

Queen Rat: New and Selected Poems
Lynn Crosbie
House of Anansi, 1998

If you enjoyed experiencing Lynn Crosbie with me, writer Lorette C. Luzajic, you may enjoy further reading at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. You may also enjoy my poetry, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Famous writer Thomas Moore did: he said, “Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy.” You can order my book online through indigo or amazon, or read more about it at my site. xoxoxoxo

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chapters.indigo.ca

There is Nothing New Under the Sun: Britney, Babylon, and the Modern World

Like everyone else on the planet, my addiction to celebrity addictions has reached a crescendo. It’s all consuming. Picture a group of four civilized thirtysomethings gathered in the big city for a night of gourmet Thai food and a good catch-up. Two girls, two guys: could be unused Will and Grace footage. Except the hairdresser is leaning intently over a tabloid that features a close up of Michael Jackson’s latest facial bandages. The restaurant manager reaches for Ebony- it’s got the MJ makeover pics, and we decide that’s probably as good as Mikey’s ever gonna look. The actress is circling all the known addicts in Life and Style with a purple Sharpie. The writer muses out loud that even squeaky-clean Nicole K’s husband is an addict. None of that, of course, is anywhere near as important as the story of the century- the public downward spiral of Brit-Brit Spears. This week’s latest chapter has on the edge of our seats: did Brit’s mom really sleep with K-Fed and the new sinister-looking Arab hottie? Cause if it’s true, it would explain just about every damn thing that’s wrong with that poor girl.

Sure, I’ve been worried about my escalating compulsion to watch the latest breaking stories of Hollywood’s filthy fallouts on late night TV. Worse is the guilty knowledge that even the cheapest glossy rag is a waste of my hard-earned money. But I’ve already given up drugs and sugar, so I cut myself some slack- so long as I am still stopping by Book City for fresh Canadian poetry volumes, Discover Magazine, and cookbooks, so long as I am completing my non-celeb writing assignments, so long as I am eating and sleeping and taking regular baths and changing the kitty litter…

I’ve railed against a machine that drove Diana into the long tunnel from which she never emerged. I’ve lambasted a world that thinks it’s okay to take zoom shots of Britney’s panties, which prove, evidently, that the girl is not, today at least, pregnant with Adnan’s baby. But I’ve also defended the insatiable public appetite for destruction, for who wore what when and where, who took what drug at which party, and who is zooming whom. I agree with Camille Paglia, though I am not nearly so articulate as she, that the stars are the stars: humans always have a pantheon of gods and goddesses, from antiquity into the modern world, who reach unknown heights and plunge to sordid deaths. Greco-Roman mythology reads like the rags read today: Hercules was insane and murdered his wife and children. Arachne hanged herself. Zeus kills Semele while Dionysus is still in her womb. Murder, suicide, madness, incest, torture, revenge, drugs, secrets, prostitution: it’s all there, and it’s there in every mythology of the world, not just the much-studied classics. It is no mistake that Diana is another name for Artemis, Goddess of the moon, the hunter and the hunted one. Celebrity is our modern day mythology. It isn’t going to go away.

Camille said, “Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.” Whether or not it’s reprehensible, it is absolutely human. The gods are half human, and half celestial. With one foot on earth, and the other in heaven or hell, we look to them to play out the psychodramas in our own life, not, as many assume, to revel in their lives because we do not have one of our own. And perhaps this familiar tendency is not unique to humans, but to other animals. I’ve long believed my cats talk about my peeps and me when I’m not home. Surely I’m mad, but scientists have discovered that dolphins gossip- no joke. See, I told you I’m still reading some science here and there!

Perhaps at this point in history, post-Diana, where paparazzi is a household word and a lucrative career choice, where we are practically standing in gas-station bathrooms with a woman named Britney that we don’t even know, it would be a good time to stop berating ourselves for our very human hunger and see if we can create a future direction for our celebrity addiction. Can awareness of our need for this kind of theatre help us create a better world?

We feel guilty for our rabid obsessions with the mad, the mental, and the maxed-out. We shake our heads and say, ‘Why can’t they leave that poor little girl alone?” The nastier among us may think, “Crazy rich bitch, who cares.” I’m not down with that- though I might trade in my humble rental for a couple of million, I’m sure that a few good friends and a few peaceful hours to read a novel might be everything in the world that Britney Spears wants tonight. Still, if her world changed tonight, if she left her house and there was nobody outside, no cameras flashing, no headlines, the shock would kill her. We malign her for seeking out that attention, but we are all victims of our environment. The Amish children who leave go back home for the most part. People commit suicide when they lose a shitty dead-end job they’ve been grumbling about for years. We know what we know. Britney knows nothing else. It is not her fault that she has fed on the flash and the adrenaline for so long.

Regardless, the media vulture is not going to go away. If it did, Britney Spears would drop dead. It seems we are waiting with bated breath for that to happen- there is more than one contest up and running where whoever guesses the date and time of that event wins. Humans are a corrupt and bloodthirsty lot. We love a car crash; we love a bullfight, boxing, wrestling, and movies like Hostel. We love war. We are greedy and fat and neurotic and we beat our wives and children. We keep slaves and we sell our daughters. This bloodthirstiness is nothing new. It’s a given. I find it horrible and disgusting and sick and sad, but it has been true from the very beginning. While I applaud every single action anyone makes toward peace, goodwill, equality, generosity, and compassion, none of these noble gestures erase the fact that we are rotten to the core. We can’t afford to be sentimentalists: realism gives us a better foothold for change. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And even that glory, if you learn about Him in the Bible, is a vicious, savage glory, warmongering and smiting left and right.

Perhaps there is the other side to the story. The side that has to follow every anguished cry of Our Lady of Madness because her cry is ours. Perhaps we are hoping for her to ‘get help’ because it illustrates our own struggle, the fumble to find ecstasy, or just peace of mind for crying out loud. In the midst of success, we may feel isolated. In the midst of marriage, we may be terrified we made a poor choice. We may fear our parenting skills. We may be scared of our drug use. All these stories do is play out on a large screen scale the same trials and woes we all have. From what to wear to dinner, to whether or not this week’s shrink appointment is going to make a rat’s ass of difference to the astonishing emptiness we feel. Britney was crying in the chapel, and so are we.

While the narrow philosophies I was raised with would tediously refer to Hollywood as ‘glorifying sin’, perhaps instead it illuminates the best and worst of our obsessions. We sneer this week about how ‘everyone’s going to rehab since Heath jumped ship.” Did you ever think that the public travails of Anna Nicole Smith and Lindsay Lohan made it amazingly easy for the rest of the world to start tossing up the word ‘addiction’? I think it’s amazing that in the fall out of this particular tempest- the unexpected death of a very talented actor, and our fear that brilliant new songstress Amy Winehouse is at the edge of that abyss, people are looking at their own issues and saying “no more bullshit. I’m going into rehab.” We can only try. Trying is everything. Maybe rehab won’t work out for Winehouse, or for Eva Mendes, or for Delta Burke. But maybe it will. Maybe Winehouse hopes to make an even better album instead of dying. I sure hope it works out for her because I’d love to hear it.

The thing is, there is no specific solution. It’s romantic and naïve to think humans have ever had one. We are incredibly contradictory, and though solutions have been thrown around since the beginning of time, (some of these bright ideas have included exterminating the race of enemies, bringing slaves to build our countries, torturing mental patients, castrating women…) we don’t have any fucking solutions. We only have our tricky history of violence and obsession, mixed with our amazing contributions and discoveries. We will never evolve to our full potential, because, just as technology has made us into magicians who can chat over breakfast with friends across the world, our natural greed has scourged the earth. On the smaller scale, we must have witnessed in our own life that sometimes finding Jesus worked, and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes therapy or rehab worked, but sometimes we lost the fight and buried a loved one. Sometimes a new medical breakthrough saved the life of our child or gave us back mobility. Sometimes it didn’t, and helpless, we watched cancer or AIDS or diabetes take someone from us.

We can’t know how things will work out. It isn’t personal- when a hurricane sweeps through a city and demolishes it, it isn’t personal. I wasn’t a better person just because the hurricanes have not so far struck Toronto. You aren’t a better person than Britney just because you take your Prozac like a good little girl. Don’t be so sure that nobody at your church knows about your secrets. They do: if only because they share them.

It all takes us back to square one. We are going to do what we are going to do. Good and evil will always rival inside of us, a tug of war that never finds resolution. So that means we keep on striving to become better, but don’t fall off an imaginary pedestal when things- big surprise- don’t necessarily work out. We can’t stop war, but we keep trying because it’s the right thing to do. We can’t stop every violence or poverty in the world, every disease or despairing heart, but we can help one child, we can give one homeless man a banana and a coffee. We can’t win over all of our bad habits, but we can probably change a few of them. We can’t eradicate all of the darkness inside of us, but we can strive for light. After all, as Oprah said, to do less than your best is a sin.

www.thegirlcanwrite.net
Lorette C. Luzajic

I hope you will visit my site above and explore my writing. If you think your friend will like me, please pass me on! You can order my poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos online through indigo or amazon.

Meet my fave writer Ariel Gore

Check out this amazing writer, Ariel Gore, interviewed by yours truly for Book Slut.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_02_012336.php

She’s so fierce and so funny, I promise you’ll rush out for all her cool books!

I Can Stand a Little Snow: Barbara Nickel’s Domain

There’s a snowstorm outside and I’m locked at home recovering from a harrowing tooth infection. It seems the only antidote to this particular type of bad mood is to curl up with tea and half a joint and read poetry.

I’m drifting away in a hazy frame of mind that blends pain and Tylenol 3 together with beautiful, melancholy swirl, half addled by the lack of sleep, the tossing and turning and throbbing in my head. All night, feverish and lonely, I kept thinking of all my dead friends. When I arose after a restless hell and put on the coffee, tears still bursting through, I looked in a mirror and thought, “Wow, girl, since when did you become such a big crybaby?”

Usually anything before ten p.m. is too early for blues, but while the comforting burble of the coffee perking promises a bit of clarity, I reach for the iTunes and crank up some Little Esther.

Esther Phillips was a blues star by age 15, distinguished by a strange, deeply haunting voice that holds nothing back of a tormented soul. I get chills down my spine, fresh goose bumps every time I listen to her stormy, intense, immense vocals. “I can stand a little rain,” she growls, opening her voice up so wide by the end, that she could ‘stand a little love’ I’m afraid I’m going to drown. Listening to Little Esther is like making love in the rain- or making love TO the rain. I picture her swaying in front of a microphone, eyes, closed and glossy-lidded, “I beg you, try me,” from my favourite piece, Try Me. Absolutely exquisite stuff, and my heart is breaking, shattering into a thousand pieces, which feels like home, because though I keep my heart taped up just nicely and functionally, too, thank you, it’s really just a disguise. This morning is more like the real thing. “If the sun should tumble from the sky….”

At the top of a handful of slender Canadian poetry selections I’d picked up was Domain, a new volume by B.C. poet Barbara Nickel. I wasn’t familiar with her work, but I’d heard of The Gladys Elegies, and given that much of my own work might be elegiac, I planned to read whatever I could find. Domain is what I found first.

You must pick up a copy and savour it, page by page, chew the words and taste them, surround yourself in their atmosphere. This is wordier than, yet still somehow recalls, the concise vignettes of place of William Carlos Williams.

Indeed, the whole book is something of place, hence its title, Domain. And I’m hoping you’ll explore with Nickel the revelations and recollections of childhood places. But I’m only going to talk about one poem, or part of a poem, anyhow, called Graveyards. I had dreamed of them all night, after all, of my own personal ghosts sifting through the outstretched dendrite hands, the axions, to fill the stories of those half-wake dreams.

To My Cousin, this one is called. It starts out so abrupt. “Phone call. You’d died.” It’s clearly a call Barbara has been waiting for, one way or another.

“How many arms have held you?” Little Esther croons. “I really don’t want to know….” Was she high on heroin here? Esther’s remarkable life and unforgettable vocal anguish was something squeezed out of a lifelong heroin and alcohol addiction, from her late teens until she died just before 50. Barbara Nickel uses music to mourn, too: she braves Mozart’s Requiem, which is carved into my psyche after the most haunting death scene in all of cinematic history, from Amadeus. “…my mind; thoughts of Mozart, how he’d left/at 35, this music incomplete, /They threw his body, bagged, into a pit.”

“I thought, what price, /desire,” she writes. I shiver, picturing exactly what she says: “and the precious/years slowly wasting your body.”

This bottomless, eerie grief she describes is relentless, but salvaged by a memory from her wedding: “…(I was honoured you’d come/at all), whispered that I was fucking beautiful.”

After Graveyards, I put Domain aside to finish later, and go over to the window and open it wide. The wind is howling and snow is drifting behind the building into the Don Valley. Months of tears I was loath to spend are unleashed: Esther is ferocious, imploring that we let her go. My cat leaps up on the sill, frantically pushing his little orange head against mine. And you could call it all nothing but a toothache, but poets know better. The air is filled with spirits: they are everywhere.

Domain by Barbara Nickel
Anansi Press, Toronto, 2007.

Mark Lindquist’s King of Methlehem

The detective novel finally has a new plot and a rich new crime background. After years of murder mysteries, cocaine trades, and oval office intrigue, the thriller has sick new lore to use as a backdrop. Mark Lindquist makes full use of the methamphetamine epidemic in the northwest and he succeeds in making his characters and the plot realistic. The formula draws on all the classics- hard drinking cop, mouthy, ego-inflated perp, desperate tweakers who have lost their way, and enough courtroom politics and legalese to move the plot along. The pages turn all by themselves: while I’m the kind of reader that plods through a dozen books at a time, this one I read cover to cover in one day. And though the plot and the sick sad life of the characters takes central stage, Lindquist doesn’t weaken his aim during the details: he never forgets small clues in the setting, descriptions of what’s on a character’s book shelf, or dialogue that shows what someone is thinking.

The King of Methlehem prides himself on being the best methamphetamine cook in Pierce County, Washington, and evading arrest. He’s a classic sleaze ball who likes his domain: he knows meth is more addictive and hence more profitable than other drugs. He also likes the risk that goes with making it; the explosions and the danger make him feel really important. While he’s a dirty bastard, playing head games with 12-year old girls to get them into his stuff, and into his pants as well, the full cast of tweakers reveals that most start out as normal people looking for a good time, for more energy at work, or looking to stay thin.

While hardly a psychological study, there are enough details to richly illustrate the interior hell of the speed freak. What struck me most was how universal some specific minutiae of madness are: the addicts all have half- dead cars in their lots that they take apart and put back together constantly. I used to see car parts and pieces of stereo with the cords cut off laying in yards, and wondered what the hell. Then a meth addict moved into my house and began taking apart the VCR and the light fixtures and tinkering around. Now when I see engine parts and electrical devices removed and piled up I know meth is not far. I still don’t know why this is universal- my roommate was looking for recording devices, and Lindquist says the speeding mind needs a mechanical mess to focus into. Either way, it’s creepy.

Wyatt is a good cop who loves his job and moved to meth enforcement to escape the stress of homicide. He was naïve then, but not now. He found the pain and madness meth caused to be a world different from any other kind of drug. He loves his job though, and notices all kinds of puzzle pieces that other cops miss, making him good at the new position. He knows that the megalomania and fearlessness meth causes are unique challenges- his perps don’t care if they die and they’re inside some other world altogether that he has to bridge. He’s not sentimental about it but he does recognize how this drug can twist a normal soul into a deranged, barely human skeleton. He also knows that years of law enforcement crying wolf is partially to blame- no one believes the “this is your brain on drugs” story when it’s been told so often and is so obviously a lie. Sadly, with crystal methamphetamine, it’s true.