Autopsy of a Turvy World
by Sheri-D Wilson
Calgary: Frontenac House, 2008; ISBN 978-1-897181-17-1; 92 pp.; $15.95 paper.

Sheri-D Wilson bills herself as a poet, performer, film-maker, educator, producer and activist. She has seven collections of poetry; her most recent, Re:Zoom (Frontenac House, 2005), won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the CanLit award. She has also released two spoken word CDs and four award-winning VideoPoems.

If this book is your first exposure to Wilson's poetry, there is no better place to start than the first poem, "I Visited the Bridge of Your Ghost on a Full Moon Morning" (11). Readily identifiable as an homage to the child who, a few years ago, was stomped to death by a mob of young women in Vancouver, it is the type of poem that tends to descend into sentimentality. Wilson is able to avoid that trap. Here is the first stanza:

Today, I came to see the bridge of your ghost
like a monument built over mortality
and the weeds and the flowers
grow below the solid line, like capsized dreams.
And I went to the water's edge
where they left you face down
in the mud,
drowned and clubbed to death.

The last line is problematic as it can be only one or the other--she either drowned or was clubbed to death. But that is a minor irritant in an otherwise effective poem. The way she concludes the poem through a paraphrase of a child's chant is effective:

and the disbelief
that they actually killed you
with sticks and stones,
and they did break your teenaged bones
and their names will always hurt me. (13)

As evocative as the poem is, one could also argue that it is superficial in that it examines hate and racism from only one perspective. But perhaps this is not a bad thing. Wilson has not done what Julia Kristeva has labelled "abjection"--that is, she has not looked away but, rather, has confronted. And isn't this one of the things a poet is called upon to do?

Unfortunately, the title poem, "Autopsy of a Turvy World," has all the makings of a maudlin country song gone wrong. The story of a down-and-out prostitute who tries to find love but instead arrives at the stage where "I've never been fucked like that before / and then she showed him the door." (22), it comes complete with bad puns such as "'cause he was counting his chicken / before he got laid" (20). This is the problem with poetry on the slam circuit: it has to be over-the-top before it gets noticed by the judges, who usually don't understand poetry. What they generally relate to is chicanery, the creation of a carnivalesque atmosphere. They would love this piece.

Several of the poems are insubstantial. "Toronto Taxi Cab" appears to be the story of a girl who gets into a cab, discovers a wallet and flees. "Girl who was Born in a Bubble" contains the following stanza:

It just popped --
different than a snap --
it popped with a popping sound, popcorn
pop, champagne
bubble pop, bubble wrap pop
pop, bubble gum pop
like culture or pop music; pop, pop. (31)

which, supposedly, is the dramatic moment of the poem, hence all the popping going on.

It's unfortunate that Wilson descends to these levels, since she is capable of writing some very enjoyable lines. Certainly, they are not great poems, not ones that will be remembered in the next century. But do we really always want that? Sometimes, it's nice to have a poem just to feel warm about. Such is the poem "Moon remembers Cuba as she," which contains these lines:

and the two pictures
lighthouse and Moon
slide into one another
as lovers navigate truth, (44)

There are some fine things to be found within the pages of Autopsy. There is also a lot of chaff to trudge through to find the wheat.

John Herbert Cunningham is a Winnipeg writer. He reviews poetry in Canada for Malahat Review, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead and The Danforth Review, in the U.S. for Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Big Bridge and Galatea Revisits, and in Australia for Jacket.

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