For Your Safety Please Hold On

by Kayla Czaga

"For Your Safety Please Hold On" is a truly remarkable first poetry collection from debut talent Kayla Czaga. Her poems are already making waves--several from this collection have received award attention, including: "The Fiddlehead"'s 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, "The Malahat Review"'s 2012 Far Horizon's Award for Poetry and an Editor's Choice Award in "ARC Poetry Magazine'"s 2012 Poem of the Year Contest. They have also been shortlisted for "The New Quarterly"'s 2013 Occasional Verse Contest, longlisted for CBC's 2013 Canada Writes Poetry Contest and have appeared in literary publications across North America.
The poems in "For Your Safety Please Hold On" move in thematic focus from family, to girlhood, to adulthood, each permeated by Czaga's lively voice and quick-witted, playful language. They test the line between honest humour and bitter reality in a sophisticated, incisive manner that tugs at the gut and feels true.
The linguistic hopscotch of Czaga's poems about girlhood is often beautifully juxtaposed with feelings of menace or a first taste of smothering expectations--"She sits. She sips her bright pink fingers. / She slips into smart short haircuts, yes, / she does so, and does herself up just so." While her pin prick meditations on contemporary adulthood suggest a yearning for personal meaning and purpose on a larger scale--"I still wander, sometimes, / my coat closing the world out of my body, with pockets / full of garbage, with my slender steady want. I still / make the bed and at bedtime unmake it."
The irrepressible energy of the poems in "For Your Safety Please Hold On," paired with their complex balancing act between light and dark, humour and melancholy, innocence and danger, make this collection an extraordinary first offering.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2014

About the author

Kayla Czaga grew up in Kitimat and now lives in Vancouver, BC, where she recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Her poetry, non-fiction and fiction has been published in The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry 2013, Room Magazine, Event and The Antigonish Review, among others.

For Your Safety Please Hold On is her first book.

For Your Safety Please Hold On was shortlisted for a 2015 Governor General's Award., and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. The judges (Sonja Greckol, Charles Mountford and David Seymor) commmented that "Czaga unfulrs experience, observation and development with complexity and more than a little humour suspending a reader between this page's moment of assurance and the next moment's unsettling observation."

Reviews

[Andrea MacPherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strong first collection. Czaga manages to explore familiar terrain--family lore, childhood, memory--but her use of language and form keep the collection fresh.

The poem 'Victoria Soto' was heartbreaking.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of poems. There's so much I loved about this book. It is full of dog-ears. I was often moved while reading the poems and one poem, Wild Lilacs, moved me greatly. "Time’s a drag and with it drags the light, / the lilac blossoms into lilac dust. But how / lovely the lilac vanishing in the low dusk, / the petals deadlining all over the lawn.” is how it ends. Beauty.
I like how the poet engages with family and memory, mass shootings, relationships. The poems can be funny at times and at others, the poems evoke sadness and surprise. I love how the lists turned, almost sonnet like in For Play. All in all a wonderful read from a skilled poet, a good listener.

I also want to mention the gorgeous cover designed by Carleton Wilson of Nightwood Editions. I'm always thrilled by his gorgeous artwork for these covers. I'd say he's probably the best cover designer in Canada, from what I've seen.

[THE TORONTO QUARTERLY]

Hi, Everyone! Please check out my interview with poet Kayla Czaga as we discuss her debut collection, For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014). Read the interview and 3 poem excerpt on my TTQ Blog now. http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.c...

[Caledonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a beautiful book. The way Kayla has with words is touching and gut wrenching all at the same time. So many lines on this book had to be highlighted and when I reached the poem Gertrude Stein Loves A Girl (specifically verse 5) I lost my mind. In love with this collection. The poems dedicated to talking about her family offer such familiar take, I swore she was talking about some of my family.

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damn, the first two sections on her parents (and grief) and ruminations on family were outstanding. The rest of the collection is strong as well, but the first poems in this book capture some of the topsy-turvy feelings we have about family so well, and the pain of losing a parent. This was just fantastic!

[Aaronlisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this poetry volume quite a bit. I enjoyed Czaga’s style and voice. I found the poems to be both personal but relatable. I feel this is one of the better volumes of poetry that I have read so far this year.

[Shion シキ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very beautiful and short poetry collection. I found most of the poems to be pretty good, but some felt a bit like filler or didn't really hit the mark for me. That being stated, the majority of the collection is amazing.

[Janet Mercer · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an enjoyable collection of poems. I loved the first 2 sections on family, they provide a unique perspective on parents and family, different and very fun. Great start!

[Alison Watts-grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5

[Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

You will gladly thank this book for sliding a knife between your ribs. It does it gently and with extraordinary volume. I love it.

[Michelle Barker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I read through these poems and then read through them again, and I know I will be thinking about them for some time. I've come across Kayla Czaga's work often in lit mags and so was looking very forward to this collection, and it did not disappoint. Her work is playful, funny, surprising, tender, and sad - in equal measures. My favourite section was definitely "For Your Safety Please Hold On," in which every single poem hit the perfect note; though "The Family" was a close second.

I can't list favourite lines, there are too many, but here are a few.

From "The Religious Aunt":
...Her water/
cooler murmurs Proverbs to the wall
while her cross-stitch awkwardly petitions
God - God bless, God keep, God rest -
she's waited sixty-three years for a response....

"The Drunk Uncle"
...Go ahead, he winks. Pull/
his finger. Braid his chest hair. Top of the odd-
job totem pole. King of the all-you-can-eat.
Aficionado of the naked lady tattoo.

Poems like "23rd Birthday," "That Great Burgandy-Upholstered Beacon of Dependability" and "For Your Safety Please Hold On," deserve to be quoted in their entirety but I don't think I'm allowed.

Blown away. I hope this book wins awards.

[Ro Prufrock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of poetry which makes you get to know a whole bunch of people. Starting with her parents and proceeding to the rest of her family, Kayla Czaga portrays people so honestly and intimately that I wanted to point at some of the lines and shout into to world: "Look at this! It is so _true_!" But still, while being relatable and generale, the poems are always so personal, specific, direct that they seem to belong solely to the person talked of.

After the family album, the reader finds lots of nostalgia, thoughts about being a girl, about loving, about being loved - old topics presented in new and surprising words and metaphors.

My favorite poem - the longest one, at the end of the book - is "Many Metaphorical Birds". It talks about Heidegger, time, being, breaking up, life in general, and about the difference between cafés and coffee shops.

I already want to re-read the collection immediately - I probably read it far too fast, rushing through it because I could not get enough from Kayla Czaga's beautiful and deliciously alliteratively playful language.

[Dessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another Poem About My Father

I don’t get poetry either. Mostly I get cavities,
ad mail. Once, I got eleven hundred dollars
in small change from my father for Christmas.
He said, you’ve got to work for your money-
meaning you’ve got to haul it through six feet
of snow to the bank, good luck, here’s a bag.
My father is more like a poem than most poems
are. He once tucked a living loon into his coat
and brought it home to amuse my mother who
loves birds, especially surprised-sounding birds,
especially owls. My nostalgia receptors zigzag
wildly through me when I think of my father
pushing his metal detector across all the parks,
school yards, and riverbanks of this great nation,
waving it back and forth – like some sort of
yaywho, my mother would say – until it beeps
solemnly above a nickel. With a butterknife
he cuts such slender metaphors from the earth.

[Hannah Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorites:

The Family: "The family passes around a comatose kid, his lips edged Doritos-orange... The family is/n't speaking and (dis)approves of your engagement."

The Grandfather: "The VHS was born and died in his lifetime."

Some Girls, July 1997: "some girls murdered Barbies and some Barbies deserved it..."

Gone is the VHS. Gone is the Whir.: "Gone, like pogs and Pluto, are those plastic black cassettes with windows I imagined mini actors trapped behind, fondly waving goodbye."

[Leah Horlick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Czaga is a luminous poet, and her first collection - crystal-clear reflections on home, diaspora, family, and loss - is tremendous and deserves all the praise it has (and will continue) to receive. Her references to particular artefacts of the 90s, and the queer possibilities of childhood (especially "gertrude stein loves a girl") are among my favourites in this tightly-knit gem of a book.

[Rhea Tregebov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among so much new talent, Czaga is one of the most exciting young poets to come onto to the scene. She's a writer of great heart as well as intellect, and the honesty, passion, and humour of her voice ensure that this book appeal to a wide readership.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every time I read a book of poetry, I think I should be reading more of it. This book was just what I love about poetry- witty and truthful and personal and easy to understand. I loved it.

Looking forward to seeing the author during the Edmonton Poetry Festival in April.

[Ali Forest · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much enjoyed this. Author is from near where I grew up. Brought me back to that space. I found her style so different from what I'm used to but engaging. I've also read some of her poems online and loved them.

[df parizeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any poet who wishes to write about family, should read this book. Czaga approaches the task with great care and honesty, creating images of complex characters and relationships that will lead you pleading for more.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to force myself to slow down while reading this book of poetry. It's a page-turner: wise, funny, and insightful. Canadian poetry at its best.