How She Read

by Chantal Gibson

HOW SHE READ is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination.

Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Chantal Gibson's sassy semiotics highlight the depth and duration of the imperialist ideas embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps.

A mediation on motherhood and daughterhood, belonging, loss and recovery, the collection WEAVES the voices of Black women, past and present. As Gibson DISMANTLES the grammar of her Queen Elizabeth English, sister scholars talk back, whisper, suck teeth, curse and carry on from canonized texts, photographs and art gallery walls, REINTERPRETING their image, RE-READING their bodies and CLAIMING their space in a white, hegemonic landscape.

Using genre-bending dialogue poems and ekphrasis, Gibson reveals the dehumanizing effects of mystifying and simplifying images of Blackness. Undoing the North Star freedom myth, Harriet Tubman and Viola Desmond shed light on the effects of erasure in the time of reconciliation and the dangers of squeezing the past into a Canada History Minute or a single postage stamp. Centrefolds Delia and Marie Therese discuss their naked Black bodies and what it means to be enslaved, a human subject of art and an object of science, while Veronica? tells it like it is, what it means to HANG with the Group of Seven on the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario amongst the lakes, the glaciers, the mountains and the dying trees. Supported by the voices of Black women writers, the poems UNLOOSE the racist misogyny, myths, tropes and stereotypes women of colour continue to navigate every day.

Thoughtful, sassy, reflective and irreverent, HOW SHE READ leaves a Black mark on the landscape as it ILLUSTRATES a writer's journey from passive receiver of racist ideology to active cultural critic in the process of decolonizing her mind.

Genres: Poetry, Canada, Education

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2019

Reviews

[Emmkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked and felt challenged by this collection. Gibson is both a poet and a visual artist, and so a number of her poems have a visual component, from voicing the subjects of historic paintings and photographs of black Canadians to distilling her own handwriting down into a (to me) opaque form of shorthand. Does it sound obnoxious to say that I loved her interrogation of language and form? Because I actually did! And the somewhat more traditionally formed poems were striking and moving (Daddy will be back soon/to tell you a story. Is that what you’ll say -/this time - when you open the bathroom door/and try to smile away the swelling, when you find/a kitchen chair in front of the fridge, and your 4-year-old/daughter holding out a bag of frozen peas?).

[Mridula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such rich work! I was pulled in to each piece and loved the breadth and depth of Chantal Gibson's poetry. Would love to hear her read one day.

[Magdelanye · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've come for your demons/ to trouble the lesson
to enough the letters/ to birthday the disappeared
p12

CG redefines the possibilities of poetry in this scalding and playful merger of words and design.
I was so lucky to see and hear her in dialogue with another wonderful Canadian mixed race poet Chelene Knight at the Sunshine Coast Writers festival last weekend. Dynamite!

While reading/dreaming over this book I was captivated by the girl on the cover. I came back to her often. It's the authors mother, I found out. This is a book to handle with reverence.

[TrishTalksBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chantal Gibson lives in Vancouver and teaches writing and visual communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University. She has written two books of poetry, and this is her first. How She Read has won or been shortlisted for many awards, and I’m not surprised. I am not a huge reader of poetry, but I’m trying! And this collection is powerful. It moved and inspired me. I read it in two sittings, and this worked for me because the book is immersive and builds on itself. As such, I have some difficulty singling out poems that I liked best, but I’ll highlight three.

The poem How She Read is beautiful. The last lines speak volumes:

every word she speak be a teeth-sucking act of resistance

every word she write be a battle cry

every tap of her pen be the beat of an ancestor’s drum

The second highlight: i’ve come for your demons. It deconstructs language, and dissolves into chaos on the page. I had my trusty pen and notebook by my side, and wrote, “unease/disquiet/violence/evil” as each stanza progressed. It starts with mild dislocation and slides…or slithers?... into something scary. This poem is a tangible shiver. Amazing.

The third is Centrefolds: Delia & Marie-Therese on Opening Night, accompanied by a photograph of one woman, Delia, disrobed to the waist, who represents “Science”; and a painting of another, Marie-Therese, semi-nude, representing “Art” in the poem. The poem is their dialogue, often moving and even witty, and so, so angry. The poem makes the reader complicit:

Hm. I hear you. Just look at em
lookin at us, readin the captions,
disclaimers, trigger warnings,
hidin behind their cellphones,
tryin not to stare.

I read that the real Marie-Therese was a slave owned by a Canadian property owner. Perhaps Gibson is showing us through Marie-Therese’s words that our Canadian history is not what we have necessarily been taught:

Look here. You’ll find me in every
Canadian art history textbook and
no one talks about how badly I’m
drawn, how poorly I’m rendered.
I know Realism hadn’t kicked in
yet–but come on now.

Please read this collection!

[Liz Mc2]

I read this collection alongside Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony, which also combines poetry with visual images (drawing, writing, photographs) and uses erasure and found documents. Both use these techniques to destabilizing, decolonial ends. Two great collections that I got more out of reading them together (which was pure chance of when they arrived from the library).

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing!
Thank you to Caitlin Press for my gifted review copy!