Bec and Call

By Jenna Lyn Albert

Rife with colloquialisms, irony and a healthy dose of sass, the poems collected in Bec and Call refuse to be silent or subtle; instead they delve into the explicit, the audacious, the boldly personal. Bec and Call subverts the notion of female sexuality as male appeasement, the French wordplay in the title using the meaning of “bec”—a kiss, mouthpiece or beak—to complicate notions of compliance and submission. The roles of Acadienne and feminist come with the responsibility of speaking up, and Bec and Call is a means of vocalizing the societal dérangement of Acadian culture amidst the difficulties women encounter as a result of rape culture and anti-feminism.

These poems are fearless and precise in their aim, but are not without a sense of play:

Menstrual synchrony’s a bitch in a household of women:

some sheets never see the line, endometrial tissue Javexed and tumble-dried.

To captains off-duty, solariums are wheelhouses.

Antique binoculars magnify songbirds, deer and that one black squirrel.

Close the blinds to neighbours. Girl, you’re bodied, full-bodied, embodied.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Release date: Sep 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9780889711396

Jenna Lyn Albert

Jenna Lyn Albert is a poet of Acadian decent and a recent graduate in creative writing from the University of New Brunswick. Her writing has appeared in The Malahat Review, Riddle Fence and The Puritan. Albert lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where she is an editorial assistant at The Fiddlehead and poetry editor of Qwerty.

Book preview

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Bec & Call

Bec & Call

Jenna Lyn Albert

Nightwood Editions | 2018

Copyright © Jenna Lyn Albert, 2018

all rights reserved

. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or

other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca , [e-mail] .

Nightwood Editions

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Editor:

Amber McMillan

cover design:

Angela Yen

typesetting

: Carleton Wilson

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Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support

from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,

ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free

and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

Printed and bound in Canada.

CIP

data available from Library and Archives Canada.

ISBN 978-0-88971-348-2

Dédié à ma famille, ma meilleure amie Katrina,

mon beau Nate et à la mémoire de Aidan Kane.

Table of Contents

Belle gueule

15 Breakwater

16 Double-barrel

17 Head and Heart

18 Worry Dragons

19 Apiary

20 Silvermount Crescent

21 Riverhill Drive

22 Sunday Drive

23 There’s an old vhs of my mémère…

24 Mollusca

26 Tongue-in-Cheek

28 Turning Blue

29 Weeds

30 Identity Crisis at Dixie Lee: Shippagan, NB

31 Jellyfish

32 Famille

Kiss and Tell

35 Dyke, Denoted

36 Sunday I

37 Sunday II

38 Testament

39 Hors d’oeuvres

40 Souers d’âme

42 Bec & Call

43 One and Only: A One-night Stand

44 The Rebound

45 Deleted Dating Profile

46 Ten Ways to Protect Yourself from Sexual Assault

50 Wrist Icicle

51 Unpacking

52 Luna

53 Preserves

54 Tinder

Langue au chatte

57 Rings

58 Miscarried

60 Date Night

62 St. Anne’s Point

63 The Placenta Effect

64 Nouveau-Brunswick, nouveau beau

66 Aestival Nuptial

67 Unconventional Warfare

68 Well, I’ll be damned

69 Hiemal Hymnal

70 The Opposite of Lovey-dovey

71 Guppies for Dummies

72 Clairvoyance

All Bark, No Bite

75 Quotidienne

76 Den Mother

78 Dog House

79 Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

80 Noire

81 Mounting Tensions

82 Purebred Blues

83 Apartment Number Three

84 Unnamed

86 To Kill a Hummingbird

87 Solarium, Solemn

88 Gag

89 Incensed

92 Acknowledgements

94 About the Author

Belle gueule

Breakwater

I’ve never been to Partridge Island—

the breakwater’s boulders, paired

with the high tide are enough to spook

any good bogtrotter from crossing over.

From Bayshore, it’s nothing more

than a green mass, shards of brown

and broken beer glass, no trespass.

A rite of passage that’s right risky

lures pilgrim punks to get drunk,

to tag tunnels with teenage smut,

to cock middle fingers at the coast:

I am a rock, I am an island, I am

campfire singalongs and discarded

thongs, bongs decorating desecrated

gravestones. My high school English

teacher starred in a knock-off Heritage

Minute, Dr. Patrick Collins crumbling

to typhus fever