Heat Stroke: Review of Sarah Burgoyne’s Because the Sun
Sarah Burgoyne, Because the Sun.
Coach House Books, 2021. $21.95 CAD.
Order a copy from Coach House Books.
Content Warning: This review mentions violence, both physical and sexual.
Poetic associations of the sun are typically demonstrated as a source of joy, serotonin, and summer. Sarah Burgoyne’s poetry collection, Because the Sun, flips these motifs on their head, and imagines the sun as our universal source of strife. The collection takes inspiration from the actions of Mersault in Albert Camus’ novel, The Stranger, in which a young man living in Algiers decides to commit murder, and the only explanation given is the heat of the unrelenting sun. Burgoyne reinvents the sun’s meaning over the course of her collection.
Violence appears in a variety of ways in Because the Sun: murder, objectification, rape, etc. Above all this violence hangs the sun, exemplified with a quote from The Stranger: “The day, already bright with sun, hit us like a slap in the face” (9). The sun serves as a never-ending source of chaos that reigns over the work as a whole. The collection is divided into four parts: sun, sky, moon, and flowers. In each, Burgoyne explores the relationship between our actions and the sun: the “unremarkable star” that hovers over us with little respite.
The first section is dedicated to the sun itself, beginning with a quote from Camus: “The whole time, the sun.” We begin with the solidification of the sun as cyclically cruel. Even when not showing its face, the threat looms: “sun sun soon / ongoing” (13). Within this text, a rush of feeling is not a threat until it is absorbed by the sun and repeated:
a powerful rush of emotion or feeling
is okay
being stuck picking wrongly
this spot this sun (18).
Women, who also have a dedicated section later on, make their first appearance here. While synonyms pop up often within the text, they feel particularly potent when describing the role of women: “make / get better, make / get well, (be) cure(d), / treat (to) recover, restore to men(d), (im)prove, more?” (13). Just as this motif appears in The Stranger, Burgoyne shows womanhood as synonymous with a commodity — not just restorative and healing, but specifically restorative to men. This emphasis is important, as it takes the reader back to Meursault and the man he killed. Wasn’t there a woman involved? Won’t she hurt? Burgoyne expertly highlights what Camus forgot: the women erased from the page.
“Part three, women” weaves the 1991 film Thelma & Louise into the narrative. I had already seen Thelma & Louise, in my second year of college, with my roommate. Although I knew the plot, and know the film’s end, never had the emotional resonance reached me in the way it did with Because the Sun. In this section, Burgoyne painstakingly recalls Thelma’s rape, and her ultimate demise alongside Louise. The re-telling is laid in a wall of text, broken only by a small circle of white in the middle of each page, like a sunspot. On the backside, the missing text is revealed in a black circle of equal size. At first, I felt compelled to cross-reference as I read each broken line, filling in the blank by constantly flipping the page back and forth. As the rising action was reached, and the violence which occurs within, I began taking refuge in the blank space, only to be reminded of what I missed in the stark black circle looming on the next page. The space cutting through the prose was like a sunspot — after looking directly into it, it tainted my vision, even after I had turned my gaze. Though Thelma’s rape takes place at night, the sun is always present, reminding the reader of its violence.
The book ends with flowers, described in Camus’ dialogue as a source of joy: “(ah, how happy I am).” This final section feels quiet in the wake of the chaos which comes before it:
the sun
sucks up the water
and the people
across the water
they see us in all
our silence (103).
Here, Burgoyne shows the long term effects of the sun’s persistence. There is an almost delirious attempt from the speaker to change the narrative, an attempt that is ultimately futile. In many cases, not one stanza ends before the fear the sun is re-established:
the sun is doing
us a lot of good it
grows us flowers
shines directly
overhead the
glare’s unbearable (99).
Visual space begins appearing more and more on the page, as though the sunspots have grown across the pages. By the end of the collection, the reader truly feels the exhaustion of the sun, like experiencing a heat stroke. With Because the Sun, Burgoyne has not only carefully crafted a new perspective into The Stranger and Thelma & Louise, but created a narrative so visceral it leaves the reader sun-burned.
Olive Andrews (they/them) is a poet and scholar located in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). They are currently in their final semester of a BA in Creative Writing at Concordia University. Their work has been published in a number of magazines, including PRISM International, and their debut chapbook, rock salt, was published with Baseline press in the fall of 2020. They are currently working with Sina Queyras as a curatorial assistant for Writers Read Concordia.