Erin Kirsh
Jillian Christmas, The Gospel of Breaking.
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020. $14.95.
Jillian Christmas has long been a spoken word icon. Her inaugural collection The Gospel of Breaking from Arsenal Pulp Press is every bit as incendiary as her performances.
There’s indeed gospel in the grace, vulnerability, and directness in the way Christmas tackles behemoth topics. Take for example this excerpt from "do not feed", where she writes about finding the power of carrying on in a world that
wants to scrape the bottom of me
wants to line its garbage cans
with the things I call holy
I keep trying to finish poems about black joy
…I might make this world love me
or leave me alone to love myself
I keep patting down a body I think is mine
to prove that this fear is not the only thing
left standing in the room.
Christmas has an unparalleled command of rhythm. This presents itself in a myriad of ways on the page: impactful caesura, text straying from the standard left-affixed station, declaring that here, poems go where they want. This is not dissimilar to the ethos of the collection, which shies away from nothing. Christmas explores themes of belonging, family legacy, mental health, queer, non-monogamous love, and being the owner of a body the world can’t seem to stop demonizing. From "(and you say you want to sit at her table?)":
mommy is worried about my shape more round peach than stalk…
mommy knows the use of every growing thing on this island she knows at least
two good reasons for every plant in her yard but she has no idea what to do
with the wilting girl in her kitchen.
As with the poems and their page placements, this collection travels everywhere. From "sidecar":
i’ve learned that there are infinite towns
worth leaving if you’ve got ghosts to chase
The Gospel of Breaking moves from oceanic breakwater pools in São Miguel to crowded Toronto bars to lonely Pacific Northwest highways to Tobago under the mango trees to the Whitehorse tundra to rainforest gardens to, from the title poem "the gospel of breaking", a
bruised-knee city
springing with all the wrong kinds of love
and all the best company to enjoy it in.
Wherever this collection travels, it never loses its strong sense of self. The many settings assert how crucial place can be while reminding us that wherever we may land, we will always find ways to carve out precious niches of belonging. From "northern light":
what strange things are we creatures
of the diaspora treasures
of the carribean sea,
knocking our knees together in parkas…
where the thin trees stretch…
to seek the queerest light
what strange escapes we have made
to want to call this place home
Lyrical and luminary, The Gospel of Breaking is a powerful reading experience. Both tender and tough, it breaks your heart and mends it again. Christmas’ work leads by example, showing us how to carry on, dig in, and build beautiful belonging.
ERIN KIRSH
is a writer and performer based in Vancouver. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, EVENT, Prism International, QWERTY, Barren Magazine, and Geist, where she took second place in their postcard short story contest. Visit her at www.erinkirsh.com or follow her on Twitter at @kirshwords.