Cara Kauhane
Lucia Misch, THE PROBLEM WITH SOLITAIRE.
Toronto: Write Bloody North, 2020. $20.00.
I’m a lucky one. I am not overburdened by critical thinking and I have always fit inside my body. Lucia Misch, the author of The Problem with Solitaire, is unlucky in this way. Her considerable will rails against the confines of her body, and why wouldn’t it? As she states in the poem “Every Injury I’ve Ever Had,” her body is “less temple, / more school of dead jellyfish” or my personal favourite from the same poem, a “corn dog in a condom of skin.”
Misch uses the body to explore wider societal ideas. In the piece “The Problem with the Subject-Object Agreement,” Misch tackles how historically, the shape and pain of cisgender women have resulted in fame and fortune for cis-male creators, and the speaker strides out of the Musée d’Orsay, blood razoring from her uterus.
The way we self-defeat is another idea that Misch uses the body and injury to explore. From “Maybe She Didn’t Think It Was a Good Time for a Tennis Metaphor”:
so if the ball splits your lip
you have only your own swing
to blame.
Then, in “Throwout Bearing, Drop Pocket, and How it Maybe Happens,” Misch tells the story of when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object and breaks your wrist (with the help of a power drill you stole in the divorce, no less, which is what I call insult to injury), noting how easily one can fall victim to their own control:
you, being you, were holding on too tight,
so your wrist splintered like a sheath of dry pasta
twisted between two fists…
it is the recoil of power
caught in your body.
But it is not all serious. Misch shows she can twist tone in any way she wants, peppering in funny notions like keeping time in ham sandwiches (“My Grandmother Saw the Terracotta Soldiers On Her Trip to China”); calling someone a “sexy little bullet factory” (“Enough”) as a compliment; and how “a Range Rover can get so lonely on its own” (“There Are Some Kinds of Wealth I Want, and Some I Don’t [Or: The Abysmal Glitz One Might Encounter While Fixing the Air Conditioners of the 1%] [Or: When Not to Do the Macarena]”).
Misch makes us admit that we all like sad stories. We all enjoy comparing broken bones. We’ve all come home to a place that no longer fits us. We have all, in one way or another, fought tooth and nail against ourselves. From “Enough”:
I was nineteen, with no idea
how a body can misplace
the meaning of enough.
In the autobiographical poems, the philosophical poems, and the critical poems, I found the thread of the body’s fallibility stitching through them. This is perhaps best exemplified in the poem “Brazen Bull.” Please take a moment to enjoy this cutting sweetness:
At night
when the vice is tightest,
she wedges into bed and sways
between the splinter on the left
and the splinter on the right.
She dreams she’s eating thistles.
You should have drawn today,
the thistles say.
Misch goes on to use the image of the brazen bull—a bronze torture structure that victims were trapped inside while a fire was lit beneath them, their screams winding through the metal throat to come out as song—to ask: if our pain doesn’t manifest as some beautiful art (“like opals in the ash” as she says), if it doesn’t bring us to some transcendent truth, then what, exactly, is the point?
CARA KAUHANE
is a writer from Vancouver. She holds an Associate’s in Creative Writing from Capilano University and a BFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her work has appeared in The Capilano Review, Fugue, and Memewar. Kauhane took a break from writing to go to therapy for eight years, but she is slowly and cautiously nosing her way back to the writing world.