A cool refreshing entry up and down the black lines into the cruel forgetting times. A toe dip then a drowning for writers with mothers they love, mothers who love to talk the past. ’You broke her heart. And you wrote’ (213).
This is nothing but the story of how it is, the work of ‘meat-speak’ (18). This is must-speak to the atrocity of the acceptable, laid out in ‘tiny pieces of glass’ (81) splat, in the face of such violent lack of outrage.
Grasses as invasive as rabbits, blackberries (246). Victoria’s southwest coast, held down. Paris, uprisings. A poetic engineer wracking the ‘violence of excessive infrastructure’ (263). The truth: ‘as we attempt to rectify our old mistakes we are destined to make new ones’ (299).
This writer. The writer’s writer. Who better to write of the ‘amoral’ soul of an artist, laid bare to hear ‘the call of truth when it comes’ (109)? But it’s Cusk. Art is a ‘serpent’, a cold lonely yen for belonging (107).
No wonder it’s a classic, this pilgrimage of learning to see differently, deeply. A wonder it took the ‘flesh-flake’ (145) of me so long to be spun into this web of spy-like stalking with its dream of a ‘prayer tunnel’ cell (261).
The heartbreak, power and music in these carefully shaped essays of class oppression layered with the barbs of racism and spiked with a fraught mother-daughter relationship. Tender humour and sometimes just perfect oneliners. Yes, beer is the ‘missionary position of beverages’ (68).
This writing style has the severity and graphic exactitude of a police report, a litany of crimes that weigh into a crushing racist violence where generations of white indifference and cultural theft form aching chasms bridged by families held together by story.
A ‘pure experience,’ reading this theoretically insightful book of practice (64). Puns as insights, as gentle and sharp as an acupuncturist’s needle that makes knowledge ‘on the spot’ (71). I meet this book ‘in the middle’, a playful ‘co-mingle’ of joy (86).
Just when you think it’s gone too far, this story turns and bites into you again, with that sweet all-in of kid-love, the stink, the joy, the earthiness, the isolation, the no-hands eating and the packs that help with the getting through.
Languish, language, l’anguish in this anger-quivering response to the hard stomping world, this hard-muscled rattlesnake of a book brewed tight with intoxicating ‘venom’ shots (77). Melt in the dare of this take, fall prostrate to the truths in its ‘black ooze’ (74).
