The Back Channels

By Jennifer Houle

Jennifer Houle's debut collection, The Back Channels, reflects the effort to build a meaningful life in a rapidly changing culture, in a region afflicted, as many are, with outmigration and an economy of anxiety and hard choices. Here, where memories of a more prosperous past loom large, she takes us to the backwoods where a discouraged woman walks, down to the shore beyond the fairgrounds, and into the parking lots where smokers gather to talk about layoffs or pay cuts. Houle's poems invite the reader to listen in on these moments and pause among these landscapes, never mistaking its often rural settings for places of retreat or escape. The largely Acadian culture depicted in these poems may still be influenced by the past, caught in its own reflected image, but it moves, as do the poems, to a steady, if moody, rhythm determined to find meaning and purpose in spite of difficulties, flux, and a seemingly pervasive cynicism. Reminiscent of Karen Solie's early work, Houle's brilliance as a poet is her mastery of language and keen sense of observation with which she draws the reader in. These poems come from a place of grappling, an attempt to find meaning, beauty and connection in the day-to-day, without being confined by it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781773241029

Jennifer Houle

Jennifer Houle grew up in Shediac, New Brunswick. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals over the past ten years and her work has won several awards, including The Writer's Federation of New Brunswick's Alfred G. Bailey Prize for best poetry manuscript. A lifelong East Coaster, she now lives near Fredericton, with her husband and two sons.

Book preview

THE BACK CHANNELS

TALK OF MERMAIDS

This is the shift of the heart’s tumbled pin,

the bloodshot eye and the haul: smokers trickle

from the old boucanerie, converted now,

one body, one bad lung, a rotting arctic char

between them: web of sick, soft tissues. Nets

of spittle, wry grins, unenviable shrewdness.

Banned crab heaved into slatted wirebounds

leaks into cynical chat. Dreaded things

are sure now, handed down, and trawling

for a private place to die, they ring our darkest

impulses and vex small acts of kindness

with a nervous calculation, shy self-interest.

Now is not the time for talk of mermaids,

questionable motives, far-fetched sentience,

or the pain of others. Skepticism rears

its double, whiskered chin, disarticulating

wonder with a grunt. Heavy snowfall

is predicted, work is to be done. Everywhere

we look, stock images: a hull shears cold,

black water in dead silence. Nothing floats,

nor swims, to the surface. Only when you turn

your back, a fin on the horizon. Excitations

kin to the aurora borealis fumble and fail

beautifully, trying something different.

FIRST TRIMESTER

I’m sure you’re fine. The body is a rough draft,

full of qualms and broken lines. Murky,

secretive, a muddle of mixed metaphors

all wanting at the heart. Though it insists

on its intent, on being what it is and things

being what they are. You have to laugh.

I don’t mean your body. I mean mine.

I am here now, having begged a little nap,

to settle, to imagine settling perfectly

in a quiet, swaddled hour. I can hear

your brother’s tinny ruckus in the kitchen,

and your father’s added ruckus. Peace

is nonsense. I have come to worry

in warm, soft, synthetic down. For what

it’s worth, to worry at the nib of you,

the tendril and the thought. And if the body

is the road to hell. And if it’s not.

And just what is beyond control?

My thoughts. They’ve settled on a course,

as you have settled on a course – Aurora? Finn?

Not to be frightened or full of irrational guilt.

If the twist came, always, from within,

from pure intent. If something didn’t, always,

have to act upon our will to change our ways.

THE PAST

The past is uncontrollable.

It’s at the back door with a knife.

It’s at the front door with a deep red

flash drive in the shape of genitalia.

It is everywhere and nowhere

like your very particular ghosts.

It is all you’ve ever known of love.

Every day, it beats you home, drifts

into the house through the vents.

It turns on your computer.

You know the cadence of its lament.

You can’t stop it, though you’ve heard.

It gathers and accumulates

like snow in the worst winters,

on the roof and in the gutters.

Makes it so you cannot see

what’s coming around corners.

Piles up. Dreams and details

enter its mouth like krill and algae

into a whale. What it swallows,

it becomes, irrevocably, as we

become what we ingest, time

and time again. It can’t be looked at,

not in the face. We glean as much

as we can. It is almost all there is.

It is our only source of light.

GATHERING

T’aimais ma blouse violette. Ben, c’était pas vraiment une blouse—I don’t know the word for what it was—stretchy material, ridged, a button-up, in style at the time. Gathering, pre-clubs, sur un de tes chums. Un gaddaring, I mocked. Moi, j’voulais pas être là j’étais gênée, j’me sentais out of place avec le monde de Cap-Pelé, j’me sentais mal a l’aise. Come on, t’as dis, ya personne qui va te mordre, pi j’aimerais right ça que tout le monde te mitte. Je te brag tout le temps. Ej voulais pas que tu saves about ma hell adolescence, pi