by Chris Banks

 Kayla Czaga is a bonafide rising star in Canadian poetry, and we should be celebrating her work across the country, and promoting her recent poetry collection Midway (out now with Anansi Press) everywhere poetry can be found. Don’t believe me? Just check out her opening short poem “The Hairbrush” which feels like an announcement that a major talent has arrived on the scene:

 This poem is only 17 lines long, but it is stuffed with surprising, “note-perfect” images. The hairbrush of a dead father, matted with white hair, is likened to an old man cactus “meditating for centuries in the desert” and then “a mostly eaten cone of cotton candy” and still further “a giant cocoon on a lacquered branch” and “a microphone generating its own static”. It makes the reader smile, and a little window opens between the reader and the poet, which allows the ending of the poem to sail through it with all its sad news, and emotional wallop. “Here, she said, handing it to me, / Go grow yourself a new dad.” Oomph. 

What I like about this poem, and what I think all poets can learn from it, is that it is heavily compressed, with very little narrative exposition, and all the imagery is doing the heavy lifting. When so much poetry is narrative scene building, with one or two strong images, across 20-30 lines, it is so refreshing and delightful and revivifying to see so many brilliant images knitted together in such a short, economical poem. It is truly extraordinary.

Most of the other poems are a lot longer in Midway, but they are no less envy-inducing. As I read Kayla Czaga’s longer poems, I hear the voice of Sharon Olds in her emotional subject matter, a poet Czaga alludes to, and I feel the influence of poets like Dorianne Laux and Philip Levine on the discipline she brings to her line-lengths she carries across several pages, but there is something else – the voice of Kayla Czaga herself. Powerful and controlled and revelatory.

  Everything seems to be grist for Czaga’s poems. A fish in an aquarium at a Pho restaurant that looks like her dead father. New parents being compared to kids tentatively stepping over a frozen lake in winter. Lights across a harbour that look like lines of morse code in a middle-grade mystery novel.

As a reader, you cannot predict what is going to come next in a poem, or even on the next page, and I deeply appreciate that.

I really wish I could post Czaga’s whole poem “The Sadness of Marge Simpson” where she writes about her father, and the deceased master poet Dean Young, and which broke my grief about Dean Young’s passing open again in the sweetest possible way, but it is too long to be fully excerpted here, but here is the first page:

I would be perfectly content to write something so touching, so poignant and end it right there – but not Kayla Czaga. This poem goes on for another long page, and teases out her grief over her father’s passing, Dean Young’s death, in further strong lines and images, and thus the poem forms a “lasting” elegy to both.

As you can tell, the passing of Czaga’s father is the “triggering” subject for the whole collection, but “Midway” is a wealth of other images too. Candy sitting in a crystal bowl on a coffee table in the underworld. A popsicle stick catapult in a town contest. Mall hippies selling chakras and oregano oil. The universe’s secret handshakes. And nary a cliche in sight!

Emily Dickinson, another poet Czaga references, said, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant–” which means it is too hard, too harrowing for the human spirit, to simply miss your father and say it plainly, without adding other things into the mix, other images constellating, other thoughts congregating, so the father’s passing is still in the periphery of the poet’s vision, but many other things – awkward aliens in Hollywood blockbusters, A Trump hotel like a “Fat gold tombstone” – reside in the foreground to make “loss” just one more thing the poet has to contend with going forward.

“I’m chopping up my vision board for kindling” says Kayla Czaga in the second last poem in the collection, and, honestly, I feel like doing the same thing with my own work after reading this terrific collection of poems. This book is brilliant, and inspiring, and should be read by everyone who cares deeply, and passionately, not just about poetry, but the important things poetry tries to make us see: like grief, and our inability to contain it.

(Midway is available from Anansi Press now! Go read it!)