Southern Two-Toed Slothpublished in Ottawa by above/ground press
Everyone represents the self’s less attractive
features with words that seek to distract, to deflect,
to scapegoat. You may think me slow, they try to say,
or lazy, but I’m so much better than the sign
to which this sinful word now points. And here I am,
and yes I’m slow, but the effort that it takes me
to go about my selfsame days is of a scale,
a magnitude, that far exceeds the limits placed
by semantics. There is no animal called lust,
called pride, called wrath, called greed. And if there were a beast
called gluttony, I’d envy them their liberty.
Nature rewards profligacy, in the short term.
I know not what it rewards in the long—my pace
implies perdurance, but I live no more for it.
HOUSING THE GREAT AUK
Masses of glass, rocks at the back,
craggy, like the outcroppings in illustrations.
To think they thought the last had snuffed it!
Water at the front, so its splash
will make the gawkers flinch.
Can’t take long or journalists will catch
the squawks and then our coup
will cool. Remember the coelacanth?
Give it eels, beetles, chocolate ices
if it wants. Keep each lost feather
for the shop – a transparent envelope,
ten pounds, twenty? At night when they go home
we can ask it about the nineteenth century.
The sea teeming with ships! We were a marvel.
Ghosts is Stephanie Bolster’s fourth above/ground press title. It came out August 2017.
Bolster is a creative writing prof at Concordia with an impressively detailed CV.
I believe Brick Books provided me a copy of her 2011 poetry title A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth in my salad days. Alas, I had a different criteria for which books to review back then, and, intimidated by most, ultimately chose against picking it up at all and donating it to charity.
I have a different modus operandi these days and am happy to say this is the first work of Bolster I’ll be reading.
Many of the blurbs and descriptions of her books seem to defy dictionary definition, and maybe because it’s meant to be obvious. I gather from the title and the opening shot of what resembles a remote Appalachian or British Columbian mining town that this chap is going to be poeticizing a ghost town of sorts.
The photo inside reminds me of Welch, West Virginia, where Youtuber Peter Santenello visited in 2023.
Looking at the Wikipedia article for the town used for the title of the opening poem of the book, Sandon, I see it’s classified as a “near ghost town,” although someone who’s actually been there just calls it a ghost town flat out.
Although I live in Montreal myself, the sort of ghost towns I’m used to are those abandoned one-road-town type places northwest of the Greenbelt in Ontario. I find the ones advertised for Quebec resemble those of BC much more, although naturally each one has its own particular charms.
Stephanie Bolster’s opening poem for Ghosts, then, gets right into things, with a four-page opener including a footnote. She mentions that Sandon was site of one of the Japanese internment camps in 1942.
Curiously, by page three, she’s already deep in the weeds of this poem, writing:
Sometimes someone chooses
a use for the empty.
(Ghosts are not empty.)
The next poem comes with two footnotes, the one on the first page showing the source for a ghost town that went by the name of Bolster.
The thing about ghost towns is that sometimes, info can be so scarce as to make the place out to be nothing more than a rumour or hearsay. Bolster seizes the ripe opportunity to dedicate several poems to the subject so snug they fit like a glove to the topic at hand. She never straight up asks but her verse seems to pose it rhetorically by dint of their very function: why don’t poets talk about ghost towns?
Presumably, a ghost town the author of this chap shares a name with was too good to pass up, so the source is appreciated. It’s copied from the Omak Chronical archives of Frank Emert, who describes having visited the town around 1916, when there were no longer businesses operating there, but a handful of souls still residing:
My first view of Bolster was on a cold December night in 1916. I had been met at the railway station at Myncaster, B.C. about two miles north of Bolster by J.B. Jones, Chesaw banker. As we rode up the valley behind a fine team of horses in an attractive black sleigh, I suddenly saw many lights from kerosene lamps shining from windows. I asked for the name of the town we were approaching, thinking that perhaps it was Chesaw, where I was informed I had obtained a position as teacher. Then I was informed that it was the town of Bolster. A number of people still lived there but no business houses had been operated there for a number of years.
Bolster very much shows her prowess in long stretches of stories in verse. In each poem, we are spoiled rotten with history, sources, facts, images, places. Brief as this collection may be, we even get a delightful bon mot on dinosaurs as a last word:
Where did they come from, where
did they go? That is the story
we wish to know.5
5 Jane Werner Watson, Dinosaurs: A Little Golden Book. Racine, Wisconsin: Western Publishing, 1959
I can see myself now, propped up with a jelly glass full of iced tea in an Adirondack chair now, reading this book at sundown on an August day, letting inspiration for road trips permeate through me from her words. This chapbook seems almost exactly crafted for that.
I look forward to encountering the rest of Stephanie’s poetry. These are the sort of poems I wish I had grown up with way back when. Something more appealing reading a poem about a ghost town than any used hard cover with dust jacket could ever give. Thank you for reading.
GHOSTSpublished in Ottawa by above/ground press
Just south of the Canadian border, what’s left
of Bolster’s ninety log houses, the few hopes
no wolf gusted down.
Little to live on, but much to live for.
Three stores, post office, assay office, newspaper
called “The Bolster Drill,” several
saloons, Doctor Beale’s office,
and a three-story hotel.
One year later, there goes the mine.
No one goes.
It was never much. Nothing
to do with me.
Prehistoric Gardens
newly restored all the dinosaurs
already 14 years old when I was born
still there in the streambeds in the ferns
the Pteranadon with its 27 foot wingspan
as dead as ever the skunk cabbage
as stinking yellow the gift shop
stocked with by-the-scoop
stones gleaming like that Ichthyosaur’s
eye by the gleaming stream
by the Oregon coast.
Farther south Paul Bunyan and Babe
outside the restaurant
we used to visit did we ever
go beyond the shop
what was there there? Trees
of Mystery, California’s premier
nature attraction on the North coast.
That filtered light on paths and trunks.
The site shows rooms of First Peoples’
arts and artefacts I don’t remember seeing.
Called End of the Trail Museum.
Stephanie Bolster (Montreal)lovingly hosted by above/ground press author and Apt 9 Press editor/publisher Cameron Anstee
Adele Graf (Ottawa)
Kristina Drake (East Hawkesbury)
Amanda Earl (Ottawa)
+ rob mclennan (Ottawa)
Three Bloody Words
Stephanie Bolster, 23 pgs, above/ground press, abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca, $5
This is an anniversary publication, a reissue twenty years after the original release, celebrating Stephanie Bolster’s chapbook Three Bloody Words—a sequence of poems and short paragraphs aiming to rewrite well-known fairytales from the perspective of the princess. In an new afterword, Bolster describes her feminist project and her desire “to reclaim women’s narratives … I was, simply and sincerely, claiming identity as a writer. In giving these women a voice, I was giving myself one.”
Modeled as retellings of fairytales, these pieces are thematically linked by their consistent exposure of the latent violence inherent to so-called children’s stories—“To think they read these stories to children” being one of the poem’s titles. While the fairytales are never named, the narratives are presumably so familiar to most readers that select elements are enough to clue in reader that, for example, a man lurking in the forest, threatening a girl dressed in red, is most probably based on Little Red Riding Hood. Similarly, a girl with “snow-white skin/ blood-red cheeks, hair as black as ebony” is sufficient to position the under-aged, coerced and subsequently vengeful child bride as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
What sets Bolster’s retellings apart from similar work by, for instance, Anne Sexton, is her insistence on the contemporaneous nature of the narratives. When “this guy in a suit comes & asks what’s it like being in fairytales he’s doing his thesis,” it becomes clear that the entitled, patriarchal, often aggressive and nonconsensual archetype of the Disney prince has just changed his guise for modern times; “it was the same old story.” The legendary “happily ever after” postures as the continuity of fairytale violence and inequality into the present day.
