Rebuild

by Sachiko Murakami

In a city ironically famous for its natural setting, the roving subject’s gaze naturally turns upward, past the condo towers which frame the protected “view corridors” at the heart of Vancouver’s municipally- guaranteed development plan. But look for the city, and one encounters “a kind of standing wave of historical vertigo, where nothing ever stops or grounds one’s feet in free-fall.”

Murakami approaches the urban center through its inhabitants’ greatest passion: real estate, where the drive to own is coupled with the practice of tearing down and rebuilding. Like Dubai, where the marina looks remarkably like False Creek, Vancouver has become as much a city of cranes and excavation sites as it is of ocean and landscape. Rebuild engraves itself on the absence at the city’s center, with its vacant civic square and its bulldozed public spaces. The poems crumble in the time it takes to turn the page, words flaking from the line like the rain-damaged stucco of a leaky condominium.

The city’s “native” residential housing style now troubles the eye with its plainness, its flaunting of restraint, its ubiquity. What does it mean to inhabit and yet despise the “Vancouver Special”; to attempt to build poems in its style, when a lyric is supposed to be preciously unique, but similar, in its stanzas or “rooms,” to other lyric poems? What does it mean to wake from a dream in which one buys a presale in a condo development—and is disappointed to have awoken?

In the book’s final section, the poems turn inward, to the legacy left by Murakami’s father, who carried to his death the burden of the displaced and disinherited: the house seized by the government during World War II, having previously seized the land from its native inhabitants—a “mortgage” from which his family has never truly recovered.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2011

About the author

Sachiko Murakami is the author of the poetry collections Render (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), Get Me Out Of Here (Talonbooks 2015), Rebuild (Talonbooks, 2011), and
The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks, 2008), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

Murakami has been a literary worker for numerous presses, journals, and organizations. She currently lives in Toronto.

Reviews

[cvntatron_3000 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Murakami's content and form are the most interesting aspects of this collection, while simultaneously being the two elements that most hold back this work. At times, the form is relied upon to fill pages, while other repetitions (like "Vancouver Special") provoke a more nuanced interpretation of the piece(s). "V6A" and "mortgage" were ones I enjoyed the most, one of which is found-word and the other which sounds more authentic to the author's creative voice. As explorations of form and content, these were more enjoyable and clearer to read. Perhaps greater breadth, in that regard, could have helped this work.

[Kevin Spenst · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the sky-high prices of real estate in Vancouver, this book has become all the more important. We need to stop and consider where we're at poetically, politically, geographically and culturally.