Mobile

by Tanis MacDonald

Longlisted for the 2020 Toronto Book Awards

Mobile is an uncivil feminist reboot of Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies and Other Poems; an urban lament about female citizenship and settler culpability; an homage to working and walking women in a love/hate relationship with Toronto, its rivers and creeks, its sidewalks and parks, its history, misogyny and violence. How do we, in Lee's words, see the "lives we had not lived" that "invisibly stain" the city? What are the sexual politics of occupying space in a city, in a workspace, in history? How can we name our vulnerabilities and our disasters and still find strength?

Written in a slippery mix of lyric and experimental styles, Mobile is MacDonald's grouchiest book yet.

Genres: Poetry

113 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 12, 2019

About the author

Tanis MacDonald is the author of two books of poetry: Fortune (2003) and Holding Ground (2000), and is the winner of the 2003 Bliss Carman Poetry Prize. She has published articles on the poetry of P.K. Page, Lorna Crozier, and Anne Carson. She teaches English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how MacDonald argues with the Canon in comeback poems in response to Eliot, Yeats, Dennis Lee, Billy Collins and others. I laughed at her remaking of lyrics and common phrases into rebellious catch phrases. I delighted in Crazy Jane, the Bluestockings, the word play and the sheer fun of the book. At the same time, I appreciated her engagement with the dangers encountered by women and I felt outrage at the injustice of women's treatment. We cannot walk alone. We are threatened in our workplaces. This is a feisty and playful book that resists the long held notion that women should be mollified and docile. The Love Song of Vivienne Haigh-Wood , T.S. Eliot's first wife, is my absolute favourite. I had to read it aloud. "Mornings, evenings, dark spittoons, you/measured out your wife in bleak lampoons." Such fun! I love the way MacDonald brings in influences of other women writers through her centos. I highly recommend this book for everyone who is fucking sick of the patriarchy.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not particularly keen on feminist writing albeit I'm a feminist without ever calling myself one. There's a certain amount of pigeonhole-ness to it, and it's marketed. These poems take a feminist approach to the city of Toronto and its female inhabitants, on the wayside its men. I had high hope for this one but it fell short of inclusion. Maybe I'm weird in thinking it is ironic. If that makes sense. Three stars because even if I don't exactly looooove something I can appreciate why others might. Plus writing poetry (that doesn't rhyme) is tough.

[Penn Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

How I loved the play of form in free fall, O bricoleuse!

Mad MacDonald hurtled me back to poetry. “From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.” W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”.

How I loved the Jane poems: Jacobs would have too!

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these poems. Some of them I've heard, perhaps in other iterations, over the years. I'm partial to the bluestocking poems especially, but enjoyed the whole collection. I do like hearing them in Tanis's voice in my head :-)