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Steeling Effects
In her first full collection of poetry, Jane Byers explores her personal experience with resilience, beginning with her own difficult birth, which she describes as inoculation against despair. As a young adult, the writer moves from complicity and its illusion of power to building a pliant self. Byers turns an unflinching eye to parenthood, as the mother of adopted twins, and examines the workplace through the eyes of a female safety specialist working alongside firefighters, transportation crews and heavy equipment purchasers. The author draws on the steeling effects of being queer to imbue her children and injured workers with suppleness. Steeling Effects asks whether what doesnt kill you makes you stronger and lives its way into the pliant beauty that gratitude affords.
"With graceful intelligence and deft play of language Jane Byers brings her entire life journey into view, from her own precarious birth through to witnessing the effects of injuries and indignities, to becoming a mother of adopted twins. Her poems are works of wonder at the resilience of the human spirit, at the fragility of recovery from trauma, at the steps of growing into love. This is a collection that takes breath as its starting metaphor and breathes the fire of excitement and admiration into the reader."
—Maureen Hynes
author of Harm’s Way (Brick Books) and Rough Skin (Wolsak and Wynn), winner of the League of Canadian Poets’ 1995 Gerald Lampert Award
"Jane Byers’ first collection of poetry is brave, blunt, breathtakingly rogue. Her language is precise and compelling, as are her poems, compelling as life, birth, fear, justice and strength. She is a fine poet, a poet who teaches us how to ‘breathe our way back.’"
—Arleen Paré
author of Paper Trail (NeWest Press) and Leaving Now (Caitlin Press)
"Jane Byers’ poems are an incendiary experience of language, inflaming mind, heart, and embodiment. It’s a stunning debut collection of poetry, deeply queer, beautiful, and expansive."
—Shannon Webb-Campbell
2014 Critic-in-Residence, Canadian Women in the Literary Arts
"With graceful intelligence and deft play of language Jane Byers brings her entire life journey into view, from her own precarious birth through to witnessing the effects of injuries and indignities, to becoming a mother of adopted twins. Her poems are works of wonder at the resilience of the human spirit, at the fragility of recovery from trauma, at the steps of growing into love. This is a collection that takes breath as its starting metaphor and breathes the fire of excitement and admiration into the reader."
—Maureen Hynes
author of Harm’s Way (Brick Books) and Rough Skin (Wolsak and Wynn), winner of the League of Canadian Poets’ 1995 Gerald Lampert Award
"Jane Byers’ first collection of poetry is brave, blunt, breathtakingly rogue. Her language is precise and compelling, as are her poems, compelling as life, birth, fear, justice and strength. She is a fine poet, a poet who teaches us how to ‘breathe our way back.’"
—Arleen Paré
author of Paper Trail (NeWest Press) and Leaving Now (Caitlin Press)
"Jane Byers’ poems are an incendiary experience of language, inflaming mind, heart, and embodiment. It’s a stunning debut collection of poetry, deeply queer, beautiful, and expansive."
—Shannon Webb-Campbell
2014 Critic-in-Residence, Canadian Women in the Literary Arts
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 28, 2022
I'm drawn to and dread the slumber party chatter:
When was your first experience?
Have you kissed a boy, gone to second base?
Sometimes I say nothing,
because baseball is not an apt euphemism.
Other times I brag, "I had sex already," and
my thirteen-year-old friends all stop and stare.
The healthy ones cringe,
then I say, "Joking," instead of mentioning choking.
Even so they know there's something wrong,
I'm telling them my story framed in false consent.
Most of the time, even now, I keep quiet about sex,
when it started for me and what came after.
* * *
Ground zero.
Water falls on black walls,
trickles, glistens.
Only their names remain;
solemn beauty attempts to assuage loss.
Shocking rearrangement of matter:
what was concrete, steel, human
is ash, dust.
Rush to commemorate
them. It.
Lest we sit in the wreckage,
hard to reconcile vulnerability.
If left, it would take seven centuries
to fill in the hole with debris:
dust, skin, sand, hair.
Now that's a memorial.
* * *
Women at forty
have learned to open loudly
the doors to shut rooms.
Having resolved the question of children
either way,
they are renewed,
having learned to sail after being refused
entry to the ship's engine room.
Something fills them, sails billowing,
a long beam reach.
Now, when a forty-year-old enters a room,
her sheets snap firm.
Harvesting the wind,
no filth of diesel,
no need.
Her house. Her door.
When was your first experience?
Have you kissed a boy, gone to second base?
Sometimes I say nothing,
because baseball is not an apt euphemism.
Other times I brag, "I had sex already," and
my thirteen-year-old friends all stop and stare.
The healthy ones cringe,
then I say, "Joking," instead of mentioning choking.
Even so they know there's something wrong,
I'm telling them my story framed in false consent.
Most of the time, even now, I keep quiet about sex,
when it started for me and what came after.
- Teenagers Talk About Sex, pg. 27
* * *
Ground zero.
Water falls on black walls,
trickles, glistens.
Only their names remain;
solemn beauty attempts to assuage loss.
Shocking rearrangement of matter:
what was concrete, steel, human
is ash, dust.
Rush to commemorate
them. It.
Lest we sit in the wreckage,
hard to reconcile vulnerability.
If left, it would take seven centuries
to fill in the hole with debris:
dust, skin, sand, hair.
Now that's a memorial.
- Memorial, reflection on For the Time Being by Annie Dillard, pg. 76
* * *
Women at forty
have learned to open loudly
the doors to shut rooms.
Having resolved the question of children
either way,
they are renewed,
having learned to sail after being refused
entry to the ship's engine room.
Something fills them, sails billowing,
a long beam reach.
Now, when a forty-year-old enters a room,
her sheets snap firm.
Harvesting the wind,
no filth of diesel,
no need.
Her house. Her door.
- Women at Forty, after Donald Justice, pg. 80
Displaying 1 of 1 review