Taking a ride with Bachinsky:

Alex Boyd: I loved the Bachinsky poems. I thought they were full of potent images and a palpable realness. Individual poems like "St Michael," are sad and beautiful and true (or at least, true-feeling) but sequences like "Sometimes Boys Go Missing" worked really well too.

I think it's very hard, in poetry, to be as accessible as you are strong and original, because going a little too much in either direction means the poetry feels off. Poetry that’s too accessible can be just sort of simple and unmoving, and poetry that pushes way to hard to be original can end up dense, overdone and self-conscious. But Bachinsky pulls off a perfect balance here. She simply says what she wants to say confidently and skillfully. I loved images like a lake "so quiet you could hear the sound / of a heron skim the water at dusk." Or "In Alberta the beef cattle blink their caramel eyes and moan / as oil pumps fuck the earth, slowly, easily." There’s beauty here, and yet the warning we’re collectively responsible for so much sadness too. After all, we fuck the earth. A line like "When we kiss, you light my Vacancy" emerges from the poem in an organic way, and feels instinctively right because it was telegraphed by earlier images like "freeways superb in all their trash and glam." The images don’t always fit together quite so smoothly, but nevertheless I respect this kind of honesty and effectiveness, and the refusal to hide in fragmented or overdone language.

Alex Good: There were two things I really enjoyed about this book. First there was the frank and upbeat sexuality. No gloomy "period poems" about girls coming of age, just valley girls giving head to valley boys and flashing truckers on the highway. She describes one poem, "At Fifteen," as "after Irving Layton," but I was thinking more of Whitman singing the body electric and unwinding on the open road. And that poem is typical in the way it shows the woman - a female Layton indeed! - casting her lusty eye over male body parts, firmly in control. She even gets away with using the word "penis" (a point of some discussion in last year's jury). Indeed, she makes it worse by drawing it out as a plural. Penises. How embarrassing. But it works because these are just boys after all, and it has a condescending ring to it that the poet's superior point of view prepares us for. No mighty male cocks here but merely impatient woodwinds to be played on. Shades of the Wife of Bath's "sely instrument."

The other thing I liked was the book's creation of an environment, its evocation of place. The first poem is titled "Valley" and begins by addressing the "landscape of my youth." But she doesn't bring this landscape to life with descriptions of nature as much as by portraying the lives of the local inhabitants. And she can do this because the young people she writes about are creations of a place. "I know how it is to have a place inhabit the body," she says in "Near Miss." "We were at the mercy of location." A theme that provides the final sonnet sequence, "Drive," with another layer of meaning. Not just a rite of passage but an escape.

Formally I thought the poems were both accomplished and ambitious. I guess the only problem I had was that some of the time it took her out of her natural voice. The form didn't seem essential to what she was saying. Her honest-to-god villanelle "For the Punk Rock Boys," for example, was well handled but seemed unnecessary. However, in the poems that are both formal and colloquial, like the sonnet "B&E," I was thrilled. And the linking last and first lines in the "Drive" sequence worked well.

Last year I mentioned that the jurors for this little thing we do here have all been relatively young (relative, that is, to the "real" jury). And that, because of this, we were maybe a bit "age-ist" in our judgments. Perhaps that will play out again this year. But it cuts both ways. Which is a long way of leading up to saying that, yes, I think there is something a bit YA about this book. Given the subject matter - the lives and loves of YAs - that was to some extent unavoidable. But it also comes through in the anecdotal quality a lot of the poems have, as well as their sense of earnestness and immediacy. Which is all good, but at the same time there weren't many poems here I felt I needed to read over and over.

Katherine: Well, I really loved this book, but perhaps for different reasons than both of you. One Alex talked about the "honesty" and "refusal to hide," and another talked about the "earnestness and immediacy" of these poems, and while there certainly are some poems here that seem like straightforward lyric confessional, like "Drive," there are many more that play fast and loose with persona and voice and tone and so the feeling I got as I read was one of always having to be slightly on my guard. Certainly everyone in these poems needs to be on their guard. There's a lot of treachery here. And whether the voice in the poem is that of the victim, as in the offhandedly gruesome "Wolf Lake ":

You know, you hear about the Body
all the time: They found the Body . . .
the Body was found . . . and then you are one.

or the victimizer, as is the case in "How to Bag Your Small-Town Girl," there is a sense that the human actors in this poem are all, to some extent, victims of the landscape. I'm not saying she lets everybody, and every Body, off the hook. Rather, she expands the charges to include the twisted pressures of the small home town.

Frank expressions of sexuality, yes. Upbeat? A lot of girls in these poems end up dead, or trapped, which amounts to the same thing. You're right, though, Alex, there are also many moments where women are in charge of their own sexuality, like "St. Sarah," and these are indeed very welcome. But even in that poem, while St. Sarah clearly knows what she wants and what she’s doing, Sarah’s insecure admirer is taunted on the way home by boys calling her "you fat-ass, you fatty, as if I were some dumb-animal, counted on to be a coward." And Sarah, after all, might not even exist: 

The truth is - that never happened. Sarah
never kissed me on the sly. There is no
Sarah. I lied.

The content may indeed have a young adult quality, in that it concerns young adults, but the way it’s handled would prevent it from being shelved in the YA section of most libraries, unless of course the librarian is the too-cool-for-school Lisa Heggum, editor of All Sleek and Skimming.

To return to the issue of honesty and immediacy - certainly these poems are honest in that nothing is sugar coated or romanticized. The only gloss here is lip gloss. Root beer flavoured Bonne Belle. But Bachinsky clearly knows that the lyric voice is as much a posture as any highly contrived procedural poem, or fragmented experimental work, or high-toned froo fer ah, perhaps more so, because of its pretense to immediacy. And it's here where she succeeds where John Pass so spectacularly fails.

I think you might both be interested to read Bachinsky's previous work, Curio: Grotesques and Satires from the Electronic Age (2005, BookThug) designed and edited by Jay MillAr. It's an astonishingly different book, and it gives you a sense of Bachinsky's formal range. In Home of Sudden Service, she's clearly doing something very deliberate, but it's certainly not the only feather in her cap. I liked Home of Sudden Service an awful lot, but I think I'm more excited by Bachinksy herself. And I'm fascinated to see what she'll do next.

NEXT: Taking Inventory