Somewhere to Run From

by Tara-Michelle Ziniuk

Unflinchingly honest but dangerously sarcastic, this collection of poems is at turns bitter and sweet, but always bruising in its forthrightness. Challenging the notion of what a young woman runs from, the collection takes on complex settings from which it explores themes of poverty, pop and sub-culture, madness, and normative sexuality.

Genres: Poetry, Canada, Queer

80 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 2009

Reviews

[Mattilda]

My favorite quote:

"This is it, not simple, not right, but true."

Oh, and from earlier in the same poem:

"I am asked to hold one side of a banner I cannot read.
I hide my face behind it"

And:

you
give
girls
eating
disorders.

And definitely:

"I don't like anything about you. This is why we're friends

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

You bring out Battleship as an analogy.
I make gazpacho because,
although it is springtime, it is
also almost Outremont and soup
makes sense for this. Van Horne is always within reach.

We are forever at (Stop The) war
and so this is where it gets complicated (It's Complicated).
Is (ending the) preoccupation
simply that? To love S. now is to self-loathe.
Do I have bigger fish (battles) to fry?

reading poetry makes me
write (poetry)
poetry makes me
dream think
poetry

I am left with
two fuchsia flowers,
ink dying their water.
Ones I've imagined, but never met.

- Two Fuchsia Flowers, after Sina Queyras's "Scrabbling" from Slip, pg.

* * *

So often,
time get measured in relationships.

Time stopped
When I started not-really seeing you.

- Timeless, pg. 33

* * *

You're wearing a liar's heart
taped to your sleeve
like a rockabilly tattoo.
No dice.

- Rockabilly, pg. 74

[Sam Laverton · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the lines I feel best encapsulates this collection is from Cocktail:
Fortunately for me, / my heart doubles as a Molotov cocktail

All these poems are overflowing with emotion, whether it be about religion and its intersection with politics, the complexity of familial relationships, or sex and infidelity. Ziniuk's writing is strikingly direct. The contrast of poems ripe with detail against those that are almost shockingly succinct makes both all the more impactful and effective.

Some of my favourite lines:

I don't kiss girls, so know that when I open my mouth I am not doing anything that will hurt you.
-From Objects of My Affection

I stain. I stain and swallow. I smell mould and think it is you. I taste ash and think it is you (I've known it so long). I measure sugar cupped in my hand. I slouch dry into the garden and give up. I slice the outline of my hands with sharp tops of cans, mark them dead for pick up. I scratch expiry dates off and throw up residue, bleak birch bark pile.
-From Cargo/Vancouver

[Elevate Difference]

Tara-Michelle Ziniuk is an activist poet, critic, playwright, and performer working in Montreal and Toronto, and whose first poetry collection, Emergency Contact, was published in 2006. Her second book of poetry, Somewhere to Run From, is full of bittersweet and sarcastic poems about love gone wrong, political activism, and loneliness. There is a confessional quality to many of her pieces, which examine a wide variety of emotional topics that range from unfaithful lovers to religious persecution, blending political commentary and personal tragedy. She describes both intimate interpersonal situations and global catastrophe with razor-sharp wit.

Ziniuk's work has a straightforward quality that I found myself wanting to imitate. I was struck by her use of juxtaposition, and how simple statements become somehow more evocative with pop culture references, such as “net-speak,” and unexpected details. Her black humor adds greater depth to poems about small disasters and everyday heartbreaks.

In the prose-poem titled “How To Be Perfect Men,” she writes, “...Every sad mix CD has a song about a basement on it. We do a keyword search for 'waiting' and when I finally remember you, every song I hear makes me feel like I’m on hold...” To me, the magic of poetry is the way reading lines like these reminds the reader of their own long-forgotten mix CDs and their favorite songs about basements and waiting, re-experiencing old sadness through the lens of nostalgia, and with the benefit of hindsight.

In “Through the Night,” Ziniuk riffs on a Frank Sinatra quote:

I’m for anything that gets you through the night. A warm body/hot water bottle/Degrassi special features./I’m all for take-out in bed,/crumbs, spilled shake from the bottom of the bag,/and lipstick on pillow cases...We’re all getting old./Maybe this is what lube is for./Or maybe it’s for people who never liked each other anyway.

This brief and unexpected mention of the campy Canadian melodrama Degrassi inspires a feeling of affinity with the speaker of the poem (and by extension, the poet) in me. References like this one give the collection a feeling of an early twenty-first century time capsule. Ziniuk’s poems are full of quotable—even chantable—lines: “People only spin the bottle/when there’s someone in the room they want to kiss” or “You/give/girls/eating/disorders.”

One of my favorites from the collection is “It Must Be Stopped,” which is a darkly funny poem about a misunderstanding mother. This is a wonderful example of the range of contradictory thoughts and feelings Ziniuk’s Somewhere to Run From will inspire.

Review by Kellie Powell

[Kellie · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://feministreview.blogspot.com/20...

[Alexis]

I liked the modern activist flavour and the personal relationships in this collection.

Written by a poet I met.