the green stool cafe went belly up
Chapbook, Jill Mandrake, Vancouver Desktop, $5
Personal histories are full of corpses, and maybe never more so than in this collection by Jill Mandrake. This chapbook opens with an awkward nod toward the shooting of John F. Kennedy, and it’s a good sign post for the rest of the verse. With dead bodies offered as closure on poems that seem to wave in and out of coherency, most of the titles leave a reader decidedly dissatisfied. Memory appears to serve as the spine to these poems, but it’s a memory that I am not inclined to trust. Try as a reader might, each poem is akin to a postage stamp that has been greatly muddled during delivery. We are unable to access much meaning beyond a confused sense of longing and a heavy sprinkling of muted pop culture references.
In “land of a thousand hairdos” one feels uncomfortably trapped in a grandparent’s house, forced to endure a series of slides on topics unrelated to one’s life (or each other). Lines like “Spilling on puddles of mud, and puppy dog tails/And husbands all home from the Legion early enough/” feel completely unrelated with the exception of the author’s enjambment.
Mandrake wants to bring readers into snapshots of her life with these poems, but fails in both content and technical skill. There is perhaps one saving grace in the collection that captures our interest and reads as a cohesive whole. “the amboy dykes” is a series of unrhyming couplets that offer a sliver of childhood, while simultaneously digging into bigger themes of female friendship, sexuality and community.
Mandrake’s collection is crying out for a sense of cohesion, both as a whole and as individual poems. (Lyndsay Kirkham)