Review of I Know Something You Don’t Know by Amy LeBlanc
Amy Leblanc. I Know Something You Don’t Know. Gordon Hill Press, 2020. $20 CAD.
Order a copy at gordonhillpress.com
“What a beautiful bird I am,” writes Amy LeBlanc in her poem, “A Corvidae Tumbles from the Juniper Tree,” one of many in her debut collection I Know Something You Don’t Know (Gordon Hill Press, 2020). This statement allows the collection to become more than merely a book of transformations, as it perhaps first appears to be. Can you transform into something that is already inside of you? Can you shape-shift into that which you already, primarily are? Or is this the process of unearthing, exposing, releasing?
Leblanc’s narrators and characters do not become birds. They are birds. They are moths and moss and foxes; they are spiders spinning webs. This is not a book of metamorphoses, but a series of revelations.
This collection is split into seven sections, “The Girl With The Matches,” “Bestiary,” “Hair: An Elegy,” “Brief Reincarnations,” “Spells and Herbs,” “Bending My Belly,” and “Hereafter, I.” In its own way, each section contributes to the process of un-burying that the text as a whole works to complete. LeBlanc first excavates women’s bodies in their visceral, oftentimes grotesque reality, and then she digs deeper, presenting bodies that simultaneously exist beneath reality and overflow from it. This is a place where bone mingles with cloth and fur, where the domestic space of the house is inextricable from one’s own skin, and where intellectuality—words and poetry—are no different than the animal, the carnal, and the violent. The women in these poems are fairy-tale nightmares, seemingly having swallowed and synthesized the violence placed upon them. They come to embody violence—violence as ceremony, violence as cleansing, violence as creation. “You can dress disease,” LeBlanc writes in the titular poem, “in linen gloves and bathe / lungs in tubs of formaldehyde.”
Dress disease in a shift,
keep the chest compressed
in a corset made of bone.
You can welcome disease
with balloons in your lungs
and invite it into your home.
Violence, illness, and physical affliction become, to these women, things to incorporate and use for their own purposes. Violence paradoxically becomes both power and brokenness. Power through brokenness.
Of particular note is the section “Brief Reincarnations.” Here lost women of literature and history emerge momentarily from the page, blinking and looking around. This section is a spectral haunting of letters and words, the poems functioning as brief windows of communication between the present and past. The strange and somewhat forgotten caretaker Grace Poole from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre tells her story alongside Bridget Cleary, a woman killed by her husband in 1895 because he believed she was a changeling. An accused witch who survived her trial speaks alongside Beatrice White, remembered for killing half a million flies for Toronto in 1912. LeBlanc has strategically chosen women whose stories history left unfinished and unwritten, women whose lives were puzzling and sometimes alarming, ending abruptly and in mystery—women who were barred from their own narratives, women who disappeared. Each woman is, as the section title suggests, reincarnated, gifted with and given voice.
Just as the moth is a recurring symbol of flight and darkness, a kind of movement and freedom that exists in and as part of darkness, so too do the narrators and characters of these poems express a dynamic, shadowed liberty. LeBlanc paints women as complex and frightening, secretive and forceful: women who know what it means to be broken, to bleed, and to generate strength, a sort of sorcery, from the very visceral quality of this bleeding.
Erica McKeen is a graduate student at Western University. Residing in London, Ontario, she is a Poetry London board member and co-organizer of lomp: reading series. Her work has been published in The Quilliad, Minola Review, Occasus, and elsewhere.