Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press, 2018. 60 pages. $19.95.
“Fuck, I always knew metaphors would be my downfall,” thinks the speaker of “Cannonball,” the closing poem of Mikko Harvey’s collection Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit. That speaker is coming around to the news that he will soon be ritually launched from a giant cannon for the betterment of society. Winner of the 2017 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award, and published by House of Anansi Press, Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit is a challenging and quietly rewarding book that seems to be at war with symbolism. The poems read like unfinished parables. Fables whose lessons have been stored safely away somewhere, and we aren’t allowed to see them.
But what is a fable without the moral? Just a story about a fox not eating grapes. These poems may resist symbolism and metaphor, but those devices still manage to force their way in. Throughout the collection we encounter life becoming “dangerously symbolic.” The speaker of “The Critic Falls in Love” asks, “Why are people so impressed / that flower petals resembled vaginas,” and is devoured on the way home by plant life chanting, “Nature, nature, nature.” Is this what falling in love means? Harvey’s style feels tender—risking cuteness but tempered with a sly, mischievous tone that is difficult to trust. That doesn’t want to be trusted. Consider these lines from the opening poem “Autobiography,” which involves a conversation between a falling bomb and a raindrop:
The bomb thinks, I am too heavy to make friends. Then he touches
the mudbrick building.Shortly after, landing in the debris, the drop thinks, O.
Cute, right? As with “The Critic Falls in Love,” this poem seems to invite and resist interpretation in equal measure. It is tempting, then, to describe the book by listing what the poems contain: strangeness, a woman sleeping for six thousand years in an art museum, underwater churches, a sacred bowl of milk, a disturbing amount of low chanting. But surprising and absurdist as the content can be, it is the masterful way each scene is conjured before us that makes this collection such a pleasure to read. The experience feels like watching a spotlight move over a dark but crowded stage. Each poem briefly framed, illuminated, until on the verge of resolution, the light moves on.
The pleasure of these poems is the expectation they create. The best of them seem to leave a negative space with the subtle implication that one more reading will give you all the answers. Of course, each reading only allows the rug to be pulled again but eventually that can come to feel like the goal—that moment of surprise and suspension where you can ask yourself, what did I expect to happen? What did I expect this to mean?
One of the few poems in the collection that does offer a conclusive gesture, “Where Will You Spend Eternity: Heaven or Hell” is a love poem and argument against our desire, as readers, to be let in, to be included. This voice sounds like Frank O’Hara, or specifically the speaker of O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You”—playful and breathless, smitten and trying to explain it. But this speaker is also aware of their audience, if unconcerned:
I went from a pain in the ass to a pretty word you said that to me
in the car and no one else will know what it means which maybe
makes me seem cryptic but even that, I think—turning off the desire
to connect with a stranger if it means remembering you more clearly
—is a kind of heaven.
Why should the desire to connect with a stranger prevent the speaker from remembering their beloved? The poem seems to point to the way communicating an experience distorts it. We are all translators of our experience and in those translations we reduce. We compress. We simplify to be understood and to understand. For this speaker, resisting that desire is an act of love. How this can be accomplished remains unspoken, but I get the sense that the speaker understands, as they pass a billboard about eternity, that this moment—free of desire—is fleeting.
“Amy,” one of the collection’s longer poems which also holds its titular line, probes similar questions of desire and communication, though it feels more sinister. The speaker seems to be a similar speaker to many of the other poems: cool and open but in a way that suggests that openness is careful, controlled. It opens:
The charming man from Oklahoma
had sympathy for the shy boys of America.
It is not wrong to be quiet, he said, but is wrong to feel
silenced. A semi-circle of faces nodded.The program the charming Oklahoman developed
also conveniently addressed the unstable
neighborhood rabbit population.
It went like this:
—Hire a man with traps.
—Catch a bunch of rabbits.
—Rent a cabin in the woods.
—Bring a troop of shy boys.
—Release the rabbits.
—Have the boys hunt them.
—Kill as many as you can.
—Don’t let the boys use guns.
—Teach them how to break necks with their hands.
—When night comes, collect the dead.
—If a boy wants to eat what he’s killed, fine, cook it.
—If not, dispose of the bodies discreetly.
—Return the boys to their families.
It’s difficult to read these lines without seeing a critique of the alt-right and Incel movements, especially when the poem moves to the scene of a protest. It is difficult not find symbolic resonance in these sacrificed rabbits. Though the poem draws parallels between rabbit murder and male violence—suggesting this violence is rooted in feelings of fear, powerlessness, and weakness (as of course it is)—the poem is interested in more than that reflection of reality. “Amy” is also a confession, by one of those shy American boys to a lover he meets at the protest. We don’t know why he was there, what he might have hoped for out of a relationship with someone opposed to this practice. Maybe he expects her to save him. Harvey’s sly and tender voice allows some sympathy for this speaker to enter the poem while never flinching from acknowledgement that the confession is coming from a killer. The poem crystallizes many of the collection’s themes: attempts at romance, or more broadly, human interaction, filtered through anxiety, shame, and disconnection. Imagination is not an escape from these concerns but a means of interpreting them, not to cure or dispel, but to complicate, to muddle, and render true.
