This is my review of Murgatroyd Monaghan’s ‘white spaces where we learn to breathe’, in advance of the book launch coming in Toronto in just a few days (details here).

I think that some books, once read, don’t let you go back to what you were. What was I before I read this book? A spartan interloper on a parabolic trajectory, the writing life edging between an unstoppable mission and a healthy hobby. I wrote most of these words while I was in Iceland (no, not these current words, but most of them…), an expansive, untouched, utterly raw land. Raw. That’s a good word. It’s short and we know what it means. 

‘white spaces where we learn to breathe’ is the type of book that you don’t come back from. It conflicts me. It shames me. It pains me. And it reminds me with a serious finality that I am one person, with one viewpoint, and I don’t really know hardship or what other people are going through, a humbling reflection that as much as I delve into fiction, real life is far richer and often more painful than anything I write about. We need such reminders. I need such reminders.

The opening lines of the intro hit me: “white spaces exists to ask the white reader to sit and breathe with this discomfort, while celebrating the experiences of BIPOC, who are used to breathing in spaces that are not made for them, and for whom we must ensure safer spaces, where something that white folks often take for granted — simply breathing — feels joyous and natural.” Later, there is a line in ‘this minute has 22 hours’ that talks about white privilege, that I moored myself on while sitting at the bottom of some black mountain. White folks complaining about little things, enmeshed in privilege, and my honest thought was: are white people the problem? I honestly don’t think so.  It’s people that are the problem – including the non-white people that exhibit the same behaviours of tyranny, of shut-your-mouth-I’m-the-only-one-allowed-to-talk behaviour, fledgling colonists who don’t know what they are. People are a problem and the only solution. I’m BIPOC and I can be the problem. Sometimes I just am. 

“the average gestation period of the typical ontario youth custody facility is 36 days and i am overdue.” The opening to ‘overdue’. This is the first poem that truly dug its teeth into me and straddled periods of time and experiences not my own but that started to build as though I’d experienced them. Tigers… wombs for landlords… urban carnage… I’m no poet. Never really tried to be one, but this is the type of composition that makes me want to try, though I know I’ll never equal something like this, the type of poem that requires multiple readings.

There are blank pages in this book. Places where you can hold for a bit, and think on what you just read, and wonder what’s going to come next. I strongly recommend that you read this book in one go – but slowly. Give yourself time to absorb the whole thing in one sitting, but sit in those blank spaces and let them have you. You’ll find something there. I was absurdly grateful for those pauses, I’ve never seen that technique used before, but it works so well.

 ‘songs for [caged] birds’, (another piece for which I was grateful to stumble into a blank page, so that I could absorb, collect myself), ‘you think autistic people cannot be journalists because we suffer from black-and-white thinking’, ‘white knuckles/blacklists’, ‘driving’, loved these in particular. But ‘red herring’ gave me the glimpse I think I wanted most, that of what it means to persevere and want more. This one feels rebellious and seems to fling the past away, and make a declaration that this poet is on a different trajectory, whatever they want, and maybe I’d propose that if the word ‘hero’ is going to be used in this book, that perhaps that word should be applied to the poet herself. I feel that this book is brave, and it’s raw (love that word) and it’s unflinching. As with anything this great, it makes me wonder what comes next. There is a lot of reflection of what’s happened to Murgatroyd in this book, but I desperately want to know what the next part of this story is. I suspect it will be great. In fact, I know it will be.

As Murgatroyd says, “Some of the poems in white spaces challenge and break rules of spelling and grammar in an effort to celebrate this linguistic legacy, to preserve it, normalize it, and also to stretch the mind that has been trained to recognize colonial constructs of grammar and spelling as the only or best way to express oneself, be understood, or be published.” Those poems frankly lost me.  I just couldn’t find my way through, but others will, but the stuff that stuck, it stuck and I’m still there. This feels like a retrospective on times that are more brutal than any I can imagine or went through, and so it has to be listened to. It has to be read and heard. I feel like this is a pathway, a recounting of what it’s been like, with a view towards a future for this writer that is open and expansive and frankly, a bit intimidating. Where is she going to go after putting these words out? It’s a daunting, breathtaking proposition. But it wouldn’t matter if she went no where in the writing world after this, either. This is enough for an entire lifetime. People spend whole writing lives looking to dispense something as riveting as this. Anyway, those more challenging poems, I’ll go back to those and see if I can unlock them, a challenge I gladly accept.What I want next from Murgatroyd (not that it matters at all what I want)… What I want is the next piece, that recounts our way out of our past without letting it go. How do we deal with these problems we face? How do we inspire change? We can shine spotlights on everything all the time forever, and somewhere in there, we can elucidate the things we need to do. The voices we need to raise up to offer a way through this pain. I want to hear about that. I think I crave that, because I don’t know how to do it. I don’t see a pathway through, and maybe that’s because I never went through it. A single recurring conclusion came to me as I finished this book and sat with it for a while, as the family slept, a big gush of steam on the horizon rising all night long. A single thought that maybe I already knew, but didn’t realize in this way. Only the broken, I think, can fix us.