The Woodlot

Reviewed by CECILIA MONTEMAYOR

Then the fish swam away. I wish it would
let me go, this feeling, but I like its warm 
hands, the way it wears my father’s face.

          — Kayla Czaga, Midway

In her third poetry collection, Kayla Czaga journeys into all the things we could be and will be and still are. Three, and nineteen and angry, and a bartender, and a daughter, and picking up bottles along a beach, and falling (in love) like a waterfall at Manoa, and a teacher, and a poet, and dating Death. Featured in the Best Canadian Poetry collection (2019, 2021 and 2024), and winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets, Kayla Czaga continues to kindle the fascination of readers and critics with her meticulously deliberate and affecting style. Welcoming scenes of raw emotion turned larger than life with witty metaphors, Midway offers an unusual and vivid coming-of-age memoir that traces the poet’s nonlinear journey through her grief, identity and writing practice.

I was not familiar with Czaga’s poetry, but I admit to getting quickly pulled and hooked by a voice that, despite being so different from mine, resembled the one living inside my mind. A voice that came to be even long before I knew that being a girl came with… lamentable downsides. With a keen use of language to conjure up her inner workings, Czaga demonstrates that, like gum sticks to asphalt, girlhood infuses loss, work and relationships. The poet’s very personal memories are then turned universal by reference to pop culture characters that echo a distinctively female sadness (among them are the iconic Celine Dion, Stevie Nicks, Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, to name a few).

Czaga’s craft is one that makes poems delectable, the tongue dancing eloquently at the perfect pace and rhythm, offering a concert of sounds that together create musical and emotional substance. What’s more, Czaga couples a lyrical voice with lingering imagery, successfully taking the reader through evocative and emotionally charged visions that would seem awkward if left to the resources of a less experienced writer. Instead, Czaga successfully creates images imbued with subtext and that inspire palpable reactions. The poem on page 41 is one such example:

The poem relies on sensorial narration to evoke the poet’s feeling at finding her father continually “asleep on the toilet… because / he’d worked graveyard shifts for so many years / that regular sleep had died in him”. Curiosity, guilt and “A fear metaphors fail” agitate the poem and convey a visceral confession that is also an endeavour for inner peace.

One more of my favourite poems from the collection, titled “The Sadness of Marge Simpson”, flows in an effortless stream-of-consciousness, second-person, style that’s ironed together by a desire to define sadness and the repetition of familiar motifs, such as Marge Simpson, Dean Young, the poet’s dead dad and chapbooks.

When the subject matter develops like grief, that is, contradictory and disjointed, the narrative demonstrates full coherence. Czaga’s poetic voice and form function as a guiding light that reveals answers in unexpected places and carries a journey of slow but certain healing.

The poems are both sad and funny, long and short, free and structured, perfectly evoking the contradictions, transmutations and unlikeness of girlhood. Throughout the poems, but primarily in the next one, I found something that we women and girls so rarely find on paper: understanding. As a teacher approaches her, “curious about pill-poppers, wrist-slitters, bleach-guzzlers”, Czaga embodies girlhood, not through dizzying explanations and cold queries but through honest shame and aching compassion.

But among Czaga’s most notable achievements, and my personal favourite, is that, through the heavy and complicated emotions that dwell in her writing, one will encounter islands of spontaneous laughter, like comforting rocks that bring haven, relief and childish levity along what seems to be a thematic and fictional underworld. The last poem of the collection, titled “The Last Thing”, demonstrates the poet’s stellar comedic timing as it builds towards the heart-wrenching final two lines of the poem. In a short free verse poem, Czaga registers all the things her father killed. Her choices are highly expressive and, yes, unusually amusing.

“With a / flashlight and a wire hanger, he killed the under-the- / bed monsters. The spines of Western paperbacks. The / soles of Fields sandals. The lights. / He killed my questions with his answers. My hunger with meatloaf / and Kraft Dinner. He killed the badger that had been / killing his chickens. Then he killed his chickens.”

Midway, to me, was a quick and sweet but potent drink. A magical collection that I would recommend to anyone I hold near and dear. It has a bit of a wobbly, if anything, cliched start, yet still contains enough sentiment and mastery to sustain you until you reach the work’s best pieces. Czaga’s courageous vulnerability and versatile poetic technique have unlocked my familial, personal and artistic cravings. I find myself going back to her well-crafted lines, seeking answers that will mend timeless wounds. She often reminds me that it is okay, that I can exist within these memories and emotions — that exposing and naming them might be the first step — but that sometimes, it’s best not to say it, but to find words that together might come close to what it feels like.

machine. You already know the last thing he killed,
with pills and neglect. I shouldn’t have to say it.

This gem of a read is available at Anansi Press. Don’t think it, just dive right in and let yourself be carried by Czaga’s funny, tragic and otherword(l)y waves.

CECILIA MONTEMAYOR is an emerging writer, originally from Mexico but, currently located in southern Ontario. Interested in writing in a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, film, and theatre, Cecilia’s work tends to fit into the speculative fiction category—and explores, among other themes, mental health stigma, conflict between the United States and Mexico, intergenerational trauma, queer love and spirituality. Cecilia is a recent graduate from the MA in English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and holds a Bachelor of Communication and Digital Media from Tec de Monterrey, with a concentration in Film Production.