Know Your Monkey

by Elyse Friedman

Know Your Monkey is the debut poetry collection by Toronto novelist and screenwriter Elyse Friedman. Plainspoken yet vivid, funny yet poignant, these are poems that tell stories. In “Bleeding & Laughing at Pineway & Cummer”, a group of teens “dizzy with spring and spirits and speed” race a van through the suburbs after grade nine prom. In “The Great Thing My Cousin George Did,” a man simultaneously drives two cars from Toronto to “100 yards then hop out/run back to/the other car/100 yards past the first car /and so on / and so on / with the polio / leg. In “Paradise Mural” we meet a woman at a Holiday Inn singles’ dance “who always tried to giggle / but it came off the gangplank of her tongue / like it had been / pushed.” Friedman writes candidly about her own experiences with love, family, and work. In “Screenwriting 101”, she rails against the formulaic rules that have come to govern the craft of movie-writing. In “Rescue” she fantasizes about being stranded on a desert island with Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski. Never precious or inscrutable, Know Your Monkey gives us rhythmical slices of real and imagined life.

120 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic work of poetry by a very gifted canadian writer.

[Adrienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this years ago and I'm not sure why it just popped into my head, but I remember really enjoying it a lot at the time, even though the only specific detail I can actually recall is that there is a poem about giving someone a handjob on the roof of a high rise building.