Rachelle-Anne Lawka

Kayla Czaga, MIDWAY
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2024. $21.99

In Kayla Czaga’s third collection of poetry, Midway, grief is a palpable creature that winds its body tenderly around each poem, appearing noncommittal in its various manifestations. Here, grief is both the juxtaposing face of “Marge Simpson in a windstorm” and “[t]he saddest creature on earth / [bobbing] in a foggy tank / in [a] Vietnamese restaurant / on the corner of Main & 33rd.” Midway is an unconventional narrative that pushes beyond comfort and welcomes a messy, nonsensical, gritty, and ugly mourning that is profoundly human. In poetry, the articulation of loss—of finding your steepled body bent over, submerged in the thick taste of mourning—is surely not uncommon. Yet, through Czaga’s insightful, lyrical narrative, the immovable, sticky, and complex tresses of grief are transformed into an exquisite and daring—at times darkly humorous—exploration of not only the loss of one’s parents but also the freshly fragmented markers of their presence that linger long after their bodies have ceased to exist.

Through her deeply personal lyrical “I,” Czaga invites the reader to embody the speakers’ thoughts, feelings, and actions, ultimately allowing them to inhabit the spaces of the poems and become complicit in the narrative of the collection as it unfolds. Czaga’s grief becomes our grief. Individually and collectively, readers experience the humanness of loss that often materializes in the most mundane of places, like “a stack of Lotto Max / half an inch thick,” or a perpetual reminder to, despite its temptations, “not watch reruns of Law & Order” and stick with the difficult process of grieving to see it through.

Midway continuously attempts to express the incomprehensible feelings associated with loss. In “I Have Never Written a Poem About My Father,” the speaker wrestles with the idea of having written numerous poems about a father and his life, but never an intimate word about who he was and who he became when his body betrayed him—when age and mortality shaped the contours of his anatomy into something unfamiliar. Czaga conveys the inexpressible, almost devastating notion of how grief transforms what conventionally might be considered ugly or taboo. There is a sense of guilt in Czaga’s admission that:

the reason
[her] father fell asleep on the toilet was because
he’d worked graveyard shifts for so many years
that regular sleep had died in him and it was only
zombie sleep he could have at that point,
gobbling up his brains when he didn’t see it coming.

Beyond the toilet and the graveyard shifts, there is also a sense of shame in the disclosure that “he worked / these shifts for [her] mother and [her], so that they could eat / and go shopping.” Czaga does not shy away from the blunt edges of complicity and culpability. Still, there is comfort here in the shared knowledge that, through the loss of a loved one, almost every individual harbours some form of complicated, often self-inflicted and undeserved guilt at what they have done, and all that they have not.

Midway masterfully blends together the unpredictable, incongruous, and throat-thickening range of loss. As the poet journeys through the underworld to visit her father, we too are taken on a voyage of elegy, revela- tion, and the final requiem by a child for their lost parent. From seemingly mundane spaces and objects—a restaurant, a polyp, Santa Claus, a Coho salmon—Czaga paints a picture of loss from the fragments of magic they contain, assuring us through a fortune cookie that “You will have a care- free life” at the end of all this grief, in the poem “A Carefree Life.” In this way, Czaga upends and transforms the traditional, rigid expectations of what and how grief is, transforming Midway into a meditation on the myriad ways that loss manifests itself as we learn to live with it.