Amy LeBlanc, I used to live here

 

When a bird crouched
on Anne Boleyn’s neck
 

The sweating sickness
descends like a swallow
to rest in the throat—
if only she had keptrabbits
and held tears that couldfill
a thimble or a room,
she may have climbed down
from the tower and opened
an apiary or a bird sanctuary—
she could have been ahatter
like her great-grandfather
and named herself Alice.
When a bird crouched onAnne
Boleyn’s neck, no onestopped it
from pecking, pecking,pecking.

Thesecond full-length collection by Calgary poet Amy LeBlanc, following I know something you don’t know (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2020), is I used to livehere (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), “an examination of chronicillness, disability, and autoimmunity.” On the surface, I used to live here mightseem to hold echoes of ” Guelph poet Jessica Popeski’s The Problem withHaving a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025) [see my review of suchhere], but both are, instead, part of an expanding wealth of titles that connectthrough a conversation around “disability poetics,” a conversation that Gordon Hill/ThePorcupine’s Quill has been deliberately working to expand for some time, and alsomoves through titles such as Montreal poet Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s knotbody (Montreal QC: Metatron Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], Torontopoet Roxanna Bennett’s The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021)[see my review of such here], Toronto poet Therese Estacion’s Phantompains(Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here], Concetta Principe’s DISORDER(Gordon Hill Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Regina, Saskatchewanpoet Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press,2024) [see my review of such here], Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-ElizabethBest’s Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir Toxemia (Book*hug, 2024)[see my essay on such here] and Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s reissuedand expanded The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID:Ahsahta Press, 2015; New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) [see my review of the original edition here], among many other titles.

Acrossa quartet of first-person lyrics—section titles set as “The Leech House,” “SympatheticMagic,” “Something in the Water” and “Copse, Corpse, Catastrophe”—LeBlanc’spoems sit amid tightness and looseness, providing carved lines the spacethrough which they might properly breathe. “The doorbell chimes and you / wantto drill a hole through wires,” the title sequence begins, “pull them out of thewall and make / a bouquet. The babies cries and you hear / marbles clatter tothe floor. You / wish for your grandmother’s knocker— / vibration clippingagainst wood, / tremor in your kidneys when someone / arrives. Your baby cries.Thirteen / months old.” She writes on connection and disconnection, shades ofillness and disability, outreach and cultural touchstones, which allow her tospeak on and around what otherwise might seem more difficult. “Webspaces tug. Aboveher head,” she writes, as part of “Undead Juliet at the Museum,” “a nest restsin the rafters. A mother / magpie dives at museum guests, / just not at Juliet.Her father once said, / Things belong in museums when dead.”

Thegestures of LeBlanc’s second full-length collection write through witches, Shakespeare’sJuliet, Hecate’s daughter, Anne Boleyn, and even Gwen Stacy (Spider-Man’sgirlfriend, infamously killed by Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin in the 2014 flick Spider-Man2, but in the original books way back in 1973) in the poem “Gwen Stacy,”that begins: “The night Gwen died, / the Bow River                flooded / knocked / over /signs,      taxi cabs,          dog leashes turned loose / along thetide.” She writes of historical and fictional women not allowed their ownagency, beyond their associations to others. Or on illness metaphors, asthrough the poem “Counterpoints to / illness metaphors,” seeking an updatedlanguage to reframe or reshape a sequence of experiences too longmisunderstood, dismissed or outright ignored. “Not an alarm clock,” she writes,“a car with two doors / strip mall / inverted heart [.]” That does seem to bethe crux of this collection: seeking a new language to reshape and reframeperception around this particular lived experience; finding a new way to speakon illness and disability, for the sake of a far better understanding of whathas so often been compartmentalized as either imaginary or invisible. LeBlancwishes you, the reader, to better understand from the inside what you’ve onlyseen so far from the outside. Further to that reframing, LeBlanc alsoreferences infamous accused (but not convicted) American axe murderer LizzieBorden (1860-1927) [to whom I am distantly related, I will remind], as the sequence“Lizzie Borden takes an axiom” provides:

They tell you that myfather
twisted heads off
my pigeons. 

It’s a myth
but the hatchet
is fact. 

My laughter is fictitious
but my father made
coffins and I used
to climb inside
to avoid
small
talk.