‘A particular column of thought’

Stolen Plums
by Alice Turski

Montreal: Signal Editions, 2025
$19.95 / 9781550656770

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

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No one—well, maybe a select few—will call Stolen Plums highly accessible. 

And some, who don’t particularly enjoy, appreciate, or like poetry because they hold the opinion that the genre is difficult, elitist, intentionally obscure, or off-putting in its refusal to sacrifice poetic vision for the sake of simple and direct communication with the reader, might merely glance at Alice Turski’s longest title—“Engines of Ingenuity, from the University of Houston, Printed and Read on Sunday Mornings, for Practice”—and return the book quickly to the shelf, as if stung, and nod in satisfaction that their belief has been upheld. The proof’s right there.  

Cerebral and cryptic and occasionally puzzling, the poems of Texas-raised, Vancouver-based Alice Turski’s debut collection make demands on readers. Your prefrontal cortex will work up a sweat as it analyzes titles like “Anagrams of a Documentarist” and “Antinomian in the Dark.”

Me, my first love is fiction, and I’ll choose a novel over poetry any day. As a reader, then, I’m drawn to—and am most content with—narrative, a good story. And while the speaker of “One of the Catadromous” (I looked it up for you: “adjective ZOOLOGY (of a fish such as the eel) migrating down rivers to the sea to spawn”) refers to an aim to “understand the human / condition,” and therefore appeals to my inner philosopher, the pieces with immediate appeal to me were—no surprise—personal vignettes, scenes observing and remarking on the little complications, quirks, and episodes of life. 

Despite that latinate terminology, “We Who Devour Pretty Things,” which begins with this—

When my lover points to three small flowers
at a corner of his family estate and says, Look,
the snowdrops have opened, I’m supposed
to know what this means. What the snowdrops
have opened is meant to do to my orbicularis oculi,
or my levator angular oris, and when no muscle
within me tenses or relaxes as it is meant to do,
his look gains intensity.

—examines difference of habit, belief, and outlook of two traditions of families from from dissimilar cultures. The domestic scene is immediate, almost filmic, and the curious, faintly Vulcan tone (“Fascinating,” you can imagine the speaker saying) cedes to a memory—“my mother could reach into the murky / depths of a duck pond and pull up, by the scruff / of its neck an alien green pod that looked, / with its multiple eyes, so frightened”—that captures the discomfort that accompanies the awareness of that difference. 

Other pieces, like “Maternity Leave”—“It’s worth pointing out / roadkill. / Worth slowing down, / pulling onto the shoulder, / stepping onto gravel / and hearing the crunch / of free to arrive and free / to take leave”—and “Husbandry,” in which the speaker offers her husband (“If you don’t know what to do for the wasp / that has fallen to the dregs of your / morning coffee, call me, / and I will lend you my husband”), who has a singular ability to resuscitate a wasp at risk of drowning, are unexpected (recontextualizing roadkill, praising a niche talent) and also strangely brimming with meaning.

They’re episodes, yes, but pregnant with significance.

Even “The Congee Test,” whose speaker confides that “I’ve grown tired of choosing / between duck tongue and the tongues / of blonde boys,” which returns to the theme of an individual—a “jumble of identities”—who straddles two forceful, if incompatible, cultural norms, is grounded by a domestic scene that Turski so vividly portrays. Similarly, in “My Uncle Robbed in America” Turski’s gift for setting a scene relates harrowing racialized experiences as it fondly memorializes the titular uncle.

Though seemingly cerebral, a cool scientific intelligence, Turski’s first-person speakers, who are difficult to differentiate from Turski herself, are not averse to wonderment; discomfiting, surreal, or gross (“Today, I searched for a dying rat / I saw last week on my way / from the doctor to the butcher, / but when I found it and saw / the ants, I could not touch it,” begins the Dickinsonian speaker of “It Even Had Holes Where a Bird Had Been Holding It”), the world holds marvels—and marvel the speakers do. And with those moments of wonder, a reader can visualize the setting while also empathizing with the speaker’s frequently off-kilter response to it.

Wrestling with other pieces, longer poems characteristically, Darko Suvin sprang to mind. Aside from having a most excellent name, the retired literature prof’s moment of academic renown sprang from a term he coined several decades ago, cognitive estrangement, which Suvin applied to a singular property he discerned in science fiction. For Suvin, a SF story or novel typically featured a novum, a device or culture or reality whose utter newness and physical presence on the page compels a reader to imagine a different way of conceiving their own world. (As a claim, it’s a stretch, yes, but for my needs as Turski’s poems and I tussled, my hippocampus handily coughed up cognitive estrangement.) 

Choosing just one poem from each of the book’s three sections—To Reach in Only for the World to Shift” (which launches with, “There is a stuffed bear stuffed in my bra waiting / with no sudden movements until parts of me loosen / and she smells more like me”); “At Least He Didn’t Die in a Car Accident” (that opens with “Or by way of humping a dead shark, / all of us jealous of the brazen thief / who had given up retinol and sunscreen / to conquer baby soft smoothness between / his naked knees”); and “He Soldered Track to Wheel” (with this seventh, and final, stanza: “toilet paperless, potatoless, / what else could he do / but marry, your behemoth / to the empty furrows / of your land”)—Turski’s crypticism suggests a novum, in this case an idiosyncratic worldview and language to express it, whose meaning for the poet may not always extend seamlessly to the reader (this reader, at least). Suvin’s novum presumes a reader will recognize and understand it upon contact. That flawless interface is troubled in Turski’s poems. The poet communicates a datum, one poem after the next, a series, in bursts, but what’s not wholly assured is that the signal is fully received.

Brett Josef Grubisic’s favourite poem is Edgar Lee Masters’ “Reuben Pantier,” as sung by Richard Buckner on The Hill. Brett assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit book reviews for BCR, and occasionally contributes reviews as well. [He’s recently written about books by Louise Sidley, K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster