Ajar

by Margo Lapierre

The poems in Ajar navigate the physical and psychological dangers of womanhood through the flattening lens of mood disorder. Psychosis isn’t the opposite of reality—it’s another perceptual system. If neurotypical thought measures the world in centimetres, this collection measures it in inches, gallons, amperes. Ajar celebrates radical recovery from gendered violence and psychotic paradigm shifts, approaching madness through prismatic inquiry. As time converges within us, we find new ways to heal and grow. From the emergency room to the pharmacy to the fertility clinic to the dis/comfort of home and memory, this collection humanizes bipolar psychosis.

Author's note: These poems depict suicidality and some of the violences that worsen the risk. In Canada and the US, the suicide crisis helpline is 988 and it’s available 24/7. My three go-to aids when I’ve felt dangerous to myself have been a nap, an antihistamine, or a trip to the emergency room. I spent a lot of time in young adulthood in emergency waiting rooms. There are worse places to be. I always brought a book.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

Published October 31, 2025

Reviews

[June · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found myself admiring the way this collection captured the still moments of life. I can tell this poet has a strong sense of observation, and she made good enough use of it. I however found myself favoring the beginning half of the collection, and I found some of the poems to be a bit scattered. I think this would make for a tight hard-hitting chapbook with some removals from Ajar. Lapierre, I must say, documents her experience with psychosis and the aftermaths in a way that feels incredibly truthful as if she could reconnect with her past self through the haze of these moments.

Favorite poems - The Grapefruit: Assembly, Domestic Disordered, When Blossom is an Ugly Word, Seriously It's All Going Splendidly, Dear Rue, Mechanisms, The Tulips' Eyes Are Xs

Thank you to NetGalley and Guernica Editions for access to this e-arc for review!

[Rhiley Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley for the E-ARC! This E-ARC was sent to me in exchange for an honest review.

Oh. Wow.
This collection ripped my soul into shreds. It didn't even bother to sew them back together, it just left them hanging in pieces from my chest.
A raw and devastating work. 100 pages of a pure and utter heartbeat. This book had some form of breath inside of it, I could feel it, breathing with me. Every poem felt like I was inhaling the words.
I have half of it highlighted. I couldn't not swipe every word, they were all so perfectly placed together.
I don't want to get into spoilers because it is so short, but this poetry book deals with HEAVY topics. It does not shy away from talking about the trauma the author goes through in the slightest. It's sexual and blatant and angry and everything about it is beautiful and powerful-But be warned. Read cautiously.

[K.R. Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

For her memoir-like poetry collection Ajar Margo LaPierre digs deep and brings back a raw high-wire reality that’s sometimes cryptic, sometimes jarringly clear. With hauntings. And survival. And grapefruit. Not easy to read. Or to write, I assume. Or to live through. But oh, the sparkling endurance.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly love when poetry is in conversation with what being alive at this moment feels like. Sometimes poems are forever, sometimes they're for now, sometimes they're for later, and right now, these really hit me. Surging with violence and compassion-- two things linked inextricably from each other-- it feels like a diary.

Thanks for the ARC

[Nicole Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Margo Lapierre’s “Ajar” is a view of life reflected through a prism. One poem brought Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to mind: “Psychosis is a living metaphor. / Late at night, the walls emanate radio music. / Patterns erupt like nerves.” It is only one small step from here to tearing the wallpaper off the free the music locked within. “Amethysts & Satellites” is the scattered thoughts of a mind too busy to focus on one point yet returns to that thought again and again despite the noise within. Lapierre paints words beautifully here: “…cranes erecting towers mine / amethysts from the cloud cover. / Rain. Let us have it.” And later, “Advice splinters into puddles, / the sky sits in her rain, / bellowing orange.” In “Mental Kaleidoscope: Where There’s Wood There’s Fire” she tells us “a cut mind coils / like tongue around cavity”
Lapierre’s poems are sharp; they catch you and force you to bear witness to life with mental illness: its highs and lows, and the dazzling sense of being between them. Lapierre has given her readers an invitation to look into her world with all its fractures and flaws: “When my name was dropped on my head in spotted sun- / shine, I mistook real for unreal and I haunted me…Each time as a child I refused to play the Ouija board, / it was to make sure nothing haunted me but me.”
I thought this was an incredible book. I have been recommending this book to all of my reader friends, and I definitely want to read more of Lapierre’s work.

[ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC!
I knew from the start that I’d love this collection. I was already highlighting lines just a few poems in, a strong start that never really tapered off. The poems in this collection are the kind that actually make you think, the kind you either get right away, or dissect and go “Oh..” when it all clicks together. There’s a common theme of haunting one’s self that connects it all together, and overall it’s just amazing, raw, realistic stuff.

[Wesley Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to River Street Writes for a copy of Ajar. Here are my thoughts.

In Ajar, the reader gets to explore the challenges of womanhood through the veil of psychosis through a collection of poems. The experiences feel relatable but cranked up to 10 due to the way in which the author depicts these experiences. They are surrounded in confusion, mystery and the unknown which makes reading these poems challenging at times but intentionally so.

Women have to face a lot of situations and circumstances than men don’t have to. Expectations are laid down at birth and when you are living with mental health challenges some of these expectations feel like mountains ready to be climbed but impossible.

Some of the poems are quite dark, so I advise readers to take a peek at trigger warnings before reading. I admire the author and her way with words immensely. Some poems trigger a visceral and physical reaction and discomfort and that’s the point. There were also some poems that I read more than once to see if my feelings changed the second time around and I would often feel a slight shift the more I visited the words.

Overall, it’s a quick read with clear and intentional word choice, emotion and feeling in it’s pages.

[Helen Wu ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up

I’m still new to the world of poetry, and I’m not always sure what’s considered ‘good.’ I found the first half of this collection a bit difficult to grasp (maybe I’m just not there yet as a reader), but the second half resonated more as it explored heavier themes with real tact and care. It’s hard for me to rate something I don’t fully understand, but I’m grateful for the chance to sit with these words and let them challenge me.

Thank you NetGalley and Literary Press Group of Canada for the ARC!

[Liz Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am grateful to have received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. This was an easy read as far as reading level, but difficult due to the emotional engagement and empathy the reader may feel for the writer and writer's experience. If you are not a lover of poems and metaphors, this is not a read for you. However, if you do enjoy poetic expressions and symbolism, and are interested in experiencing and getting insight into the turmoil that can come with mental health struggles, this is a great read.

[Margo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm the author of this book. Thank you for taking the time to read it!

Here's what some of my favourite poets had to say about Ajar:

With fierce attention and care, Margo LaPierre chronicles the sharp, shifting edges of gendered violence through the kaleidoscope of psychosis. Holding space for trauma’s echoes and ghosts, Ajar reframes perception—and time itself. These are poems of burrs and blossoms, poisons and salves, starkness and strength. In a sensorial convergence, LaPierre offers an exquisite, needed measure of the world: symphonic, electric, and as ethereal and arresting as a vicious gasp.

—Sandra Ridley, author of Vixen

These poems make me want to strip off my skin and jump from a balcony, wearing come-hither shoes, into an inconvenience store after an overdose on entropy. LaPierre can write the pants off anyone. These poems are smart, sexy, deathly, and—I am in love.

—Susan Musgrave, author of Exculpatory Lilies

Margo LaPierre’s Ajar is an ecstatic punch to the gut. Unflinching, rich, and infinitely gorgeous, this collection offers an exquisite dissection of mental illness, gendered violence, and their many intersections. Through her equally airy, personal, and precise language, LaPierre’s words and worlds resound and provoke. The result is appropriately unsettling: as if the work of Edward Gorey and Bronwen Wallace had word babies—deliriously beautiful and familiarly off-kilter offspring. A must-read.

—Hollay Ghadery, author of Fuse

Ajar follows the time travel of a mind haunted by chemistries of violence and suicidality. LaPierre’s keen lyrical voice creates a palimpsest of overlapping timelines and selves, and methodically crafts an expansive theory of Mad temporality and survival. These poems are rituals for haunting oneself into the future.

—Rebecca Salazar, author of antibody

[Danni · Rating 4 out of 5]

My god what a knockout of a book. In under 100 pages is crazy.

This is such a gut punch of a collection, raw proof that some of the best art comes from the most difficult places. Ajar is a necessary, searing look at the true cost of bipolar psychosis when tangled up with the trauma of gendered violence. It's the kind of book that demands your full attention and leaves you breathing differently afterward. The most essential takeaway I got here is the author's radical reframing of madness. She rejects the idea that psychosis is an opposing reality. Instead, she argues it’s a valid, though harrowing, perceptual system. While neurotypical thought is measuring the world in centimeters, her mind is using "inches, gallons, amperes." This isn't abstract poetry; it is a meticulously charged exploration of how it feels to live with a brain that processes the world at a different, often overwhelming, frequency.

The journey she maps out is so human. We are taken through the sterile, yet emotionally loaded, settings of recovery: the emergency room, the waiting period at the fertility clinic, the quiet desperation of the pharmacy, and the layered weight of memory. This grounding anchors the internal chaos, making the experience of bipolar psychosis palpable and deeply real. Yeah a little depressing. It’s meant to be. It doesn't gloss over suicidality or the violences that push someone to the brink. But by giving this darkness such clear, beautiful language, the book performs an act of alchemy. It celebrates "radical recovery" not as a tidy ending, but as the hard-won resilience found when you finally decide to leave the door to your future, however slightly, AJAR. (see what I did there?)

This poetry collection is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of poetry, mental health advocacy, and fierce emotional truth.

4.5 ⭐️

[David Carriere]

Ajar is a fierce, luminous collection one that doesn’t just explore psychosis but rebuilds the very language we use to understand it. Margo Lapierre writes with a clarity so sharp it feels like truth cutting through fog. These poems measure the world in new units: inches of dread, gallons of grief, amperes of insight. What emerges is not distortion, but an alternative coherence one that makes room for danger, tenderness, rupture, and repair.

The book moves through clinical spaces (ERs, pharmacies, waiting rooms), then back into memory and identity with remarkable precision. Lapierre refuses to “flatten” psychosis to diagnosis; instead, she restores dimensionality, agency, and humanity to experiences often misunderstood or feared. There’s vulnerability here, but also resistance an insistence on complexity, survival, and the reshaping of self.

Ajar is raw, brilliant, and deeply compassionate. A vital read for anyone who cares about mental health, poetry as witness, or the strange, private universes we carry inside us.

[Alexis Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply moving, gripping, and an emotional tempest.

'Ajar' by Margo LaPierre is an amazing collection of poems that dealt with topic's typically missed or avoided. As someone who struggles with bipolar, I really resonated with the highs and dangerous lows depicted through LaPierre's words. As a woman, I resonated with society struggles highlighted.

I recommend this for anyone who struggles with mental health and just wants to feel like someone, anyone, understands them. Here you are seen, heard, and understood. This work does use a great deal of poetical techniques and structures, so if you are a fan of poetry as an art form, this is immaculate.

Thank you to Netgalley and The Literary Press Group of Canada for allowing me to opportunity to read this eArc in exchange for an honest review!

[Anastey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you Netgalley, Literary Press Group of Canada, and Margo LaPierre for sending me this advance review copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This was not my cup of tea.

It was an endless stream of consciousness that made absolutely no sense. The format and writing style kept changing constantly, and there was no rhyme or reason to the whole book. I get that it's about psychosis, but this was random to the point of being unreadable a lot of the time.

[SneakySquid · Rating 4 out of 5]

The war for mental health is laid clear to see. Margos battle is displayed through poems. Some by allegory and some by clear blunt descriptions. The back forth highs and lows. If you have struggle with your personal mental health war. You can learn from others and Margo has a powerful collection for you to relate to.

We all will endure.

[Natasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

An achingly beautiful and honest book, LaPierre cuts straight to the heart with her raw, visceral prose.

I loved how she balanced her poems between surreal vs more concrete imagery/subjects, and wasn't afraid of experimenting with form. I bookmarked so many poems, but I think my favourite was "Hysteresis;" simple yet powerful, LaPierre's talent with her words really helped draw incredibly poignant parallels and connections in everything she wrote.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.