The image in the mirror

Pitiful
by Brandi Bird

Toronto: House of Anansi, 2026
$22.99 / 9781487014087

Reviewed by Joanna Streetly

*

In terms of scope and talent, Brandi Bird’s sophomore poetry collection, Pitiful, is anything but. Bird’s poems glitter with visceral moments and details—multi-faceted crystals of personal experience that lodge unforgettably in the reader’s mind. Bird, who is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer, sets much of the collection in a psych ward, where their body and brain—malnourished by an eating disorder—have caused them to “act crazy” (which in turn makes them feel crazy).

The lead poem, “Autobiography,” finds the poet in a pit of hunger “that will always return.” They write of throwing up five times a day as a girl of twenty-five, likening the act of purging to that of religious purification—a supplicant bowing to society’s expectations of thinness, attending to the devotional rituals of tying back hair, kneeling and vomiting; or the gnawing of red knuckles “when hunger overtakes the day.” This poem clearly outlines the concept of the collection:

This poem begins where Bulimia ends
or maybe, just maybe, when it started. Where
the differential diagnosis is confused
by decades of self-made violence. Poverty,
colonialism, god, all prisms that will shatter
one day, if not now…

But Bird’s formative influences are not confined to the unblinking patriarchal gaze of religion. There is another connection between starvation and desire—Bird’s eleven-year old sexual attraction to the character Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who visibly starves on screen, growing increasingly pale and gaunt. By comparison, Bird’s mirror reflects a darker complexion and rounder face, one which so strongly resembles their mother’s that they’ll “never forget / her cheekbones. Branches to hang / myself on.” 

Added to society’s unrelenting and unattainable pressure on women to be stick thin—an expectation that is itself often rooted in racist ideologies—there is also the fact of growing up as an Indigenous person in Canada’s dominant colonial society—of feeling discounted, inconsequential, “not listened to,” and the wishful idea that these harms would be annulled if only Bird (The All + Flesh) could become both thinner and paler. In the psych ward Bird reveals not wanting “competition from a white girl” because “Her sadness / is always prettier / than mine.”

Threaded through the collection is the flickering volatility of Bird’s childhood in Winnipeg: poverty, a questionable father figure, unstable housing and/or family members, the damaging effects of societal discrimination and a conflicted maternal relationship. But despite maternal tensions, over the course of the book there also is a sense of the mother as a steadying force, mimicking the age-old push-pull of mother-child relationships. “Post Memory,” a long dreamy series of fragments stitched with harsh psych-ward flashes, demonstrates this conflict:

My mother

           cracked me open with dry hands,

palms rough, her labour long, 

           & forgotten by the end

                        of that day. Pain is attentive

                                       & then loses focus.

Mother pulled me out & I

              was sunlight.

                            Burnt her eyes.

She punished me for it. Now I punish

                            myself.

                                         My mother thinks she knows me.

Juxtaposed against the latter declaration is Bird’s poignant vulnerability and loneliness: “I call for my mother in my sleep & the whole city collapses.”

Bird’s attention to line breaks imbues their words with careful emphasis, as in the word punish. Indeed, Bird’s remarkable language, which seems to flow directly from the muse with little need for intervention, is something described on the author’s Acknowledgements page as “a form of relationality done with the dirt inside me,” and is constantly complemented by precise use of line breaks and white space. Bird, who now resides in the Lower Mainland, may be blessed with the gift of poetry, but also hones and perfects the work with the kind of attention that moves it toward genius.

It’s a relief, then, when the younger Bird stumbles on a new and positive embodiment of religion: “I recognize myself in poetry,“ Bird writes in “Post Memory.” “The idea that I belong here.” For someone so tormented by displacement, this discovery of poetry—something to which they can belong—is a vital turning point.

While “Post Memory” is specifically about Bird’s time in the psych ward, the poems that follow relate to other parts of their childhood or adolescence. There are continuing undertones of self-punishment, and we see Jesus hanging by his wrists on their childhood bedroom wall, evoking the attempted erasure of Bird’s Indigenous culture—one that traditionally nurtured children—by a culture that used religious fear to enforce assimilation at Indian Residential schools. This becomes the cornerstone of Bird’s gradual self-awareness as they realize, “I’m afraid of fear.”

The poem “Continuum” drifts with former selves, or eras of the self, as seen through the antidepressant Trazadone’s “curtain of glitter.” Here, there is wistfulness and seeking. “Minutes shimmer / & cradle my head close. Time / is still so cruel to children. I grow & grow / & never get closer to my beginning.” But despite the haze of sedation, there is growing desperation in this poem: an active personal goal in the words, “I will myself to be loved / by any means necessary.”

Bird inhabits a reality plagued by the “sting / of women with English names … good names, all better / than mine.” But in “Rachel, 2049,” there is a milestone as Bird begins to see a larger collective. They identify with Larissa Lai’s stories of immigrant shame as well as the rebellious streak in the Nexus-6 Replicants from Bladerunner. In this poem there is also grief for a man who is “buried under a dead tree” and mention of a child being born, prompting Bird to “understand my mother” for the first time. This is an important and spacious poem, not to be rushed, suggestive of enormous personal upheaval:

 

my hands let go
of hers &

                                             she
                                             won’t remember
                                             my face but I remember

the real of her cry

               (the real of the pain)

Even here, Bird’s desolation is end-stopped by the frank observation that this child’s eyes “will turn from / blue to brown when she / grows up.”

The girl of this collection is not limited to the struggle with Bulimia, but also turns their gaze to the larger issues of colonization, displacement, cultural alienation, racism, intergenerational trauma, and the settler-colonial nation in which they live. This is illustrated in “Stolen is a State & I will Personify it”: “Stolen is a word I walk behind … Stolen is faster than I am.”

“The Evidence” is a visually powerful poem that asks, “when / will I / wash out” and erases its own typeface with more and more white space until the last page, empty of words, is marked only by (societal?) whiteness and typographical slashes—evocative of harm or self-harm. 

Personal development in this collection is not won in broad strokes, but in painful increments. A more dramatic transformation would invalidate the “real” of Bird’s tremendous and ongoing struggle to heal. The final poems shift toward references of the land, self-interrogation, and self-discovery, eventually culminating, in “Other Woman,” to Bird announcing themself “a new woman.” Bird’s final villanelle, “Mirror,” brings contemplative echoes of land and mother, these healing themes combined with the unrelenting road mirrored both behind Brandi Bird and ahead. That the mirror is used to see a way forward (instead of seeing body size or other self-perceived personal deficiencies) is, in itself, a triumph. 

This book, too, is a triumph.

[Editor’s note: Brandi Bird will read in Victoria on April 17. In Vancouver, the poet will launch Pitiful on April 8.]

Joanna Streetly is the published author of five books. Her writing can be found in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Best Canadian Essays 2017, and many anthologies and literary magazines. She has lived in unceded Tla-o-qui-aht territory for over thirty years and was the inaugural Tofino Poet Laureate. Her 2025 poetry collection, All of Us Hidden, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith. [Editor’s note: the review of Pitiful is Joanna’s first for BCR and we’re happy to publish it.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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