I spent, like, a week after I first read this zine trying to figure out why I didn’t like it. Jason Heroux obviously has a way with words and an active imagination. His poems are all short, and for a good reason (the best, probably, for a poet). He picks his words carefully, there’s nothing extra lying around, getting in the way of the stories he’s trying to tell. So what was it I didn’t like about these poems? I finally figured it out: he’s trying to tell us Stories (with a capital “S”) instead of naming things or getting to their hearts. Every poem in this collection describes something happen-ing–Jason imagines a woman in front of a flower shop, seasons change, dawn breaks, shoes fall from the sky–but you never quite get a sense of why you need to know any of it. There are interesting images and ideas in almost every poem, and they’re all creative, but they aren’t really poems when it comes down to it, they’re stories trapped in the wrong form. The grammar he uses proves it; there’s an excess of verbs. Everything in these poems is always crashing and clinging and soaring and dreaming and trembling, but we never get to the heart of why that’s important, why it matters or what it means. (Emma Healey)
zine/chapbook, Jason Heroux, $5, Mercutio Press, 4474 Hingston Ave, Montreal, Que, H4A 2J9