‘Exploring our own bodies and sexualities’

Gold Star
by Emma McKenna

Toronto: Book*hug, 2026
$22.95 / 9781771669740

Reviewed by Carellin Brooks

*

There’s just not enough sex in Canadian poetry.

Never fear, though. Emma McKenna is here to fill the breach with her newest book, Gold Star.

Gold star lesbians, for those not in the know, are women who have never slept with men.

It’s a tongue-in-cheek designation, proffered as an ironic credential mostly by masculine women, who wouldn’t be interested anyway.

For a while, it seems the narrator of these poems might be a member of that exclusive club, as she sets the scene in “Miraculous”:


 

                                                                                                       pushed myself up against
                                                                                                                     the bravest bodies
slapped pinched bruised
for rapture
                                                                                                       in alleys doorways stalls
                                                                                                                    any rigid surface

Slewed from one side to the other of the page, this poem slaps us up against a questing intelligence bent on its own satisfaction. I’d like to stay here, but I have to note that not every sexual experience depicted in Gold Star is positive.

The first poem of the book explains that male predation shadows multiple generations of the women in McKenna’s family. “I was five / when my mother told me she would run / from one tunnel to another.” The narrator finds herself similarly wary after a male lover has sex with her without protection. In “Howl,” she goes over and over her own potential culpability: “I am letting go of the shame that I let him walk in.” 

This collection covers the poet’s childhood (Breech), young adulthood (Breach) and adulthood (Break). The loose tripartite structure allows these pieces to muse on everything from early sensations to her later experience of potential motherhood and the grief of disability. 

But some of these poems, in addition, are simply stunningly beautiful. My favourite in this book, “St. Clement,” is worth quoting in its entirety:

begged for a boiled hot dog / felted tip to velvet butterfly
kicked a boy in the stomach / truck tire pinched neck
immured in the sandbox / glabella stricken by a baseball
just another lamb on a hill / lanced for a wet surrender

These precise sensory descriptions of childhood, along with the poem’s structure of lines pushed up against each other, creating new associations through their proximity, are to my mind emblematic of poetry’s unique power. There is nothing overtly stated here. Instead, the movement from powerlessness and want through violence in miniature and potentially even death in the midst of innocence is charted in a mere eight deft turns. It’s a breathtaking display of virtuosity, hinting at the breadth of McKenna’s craft. 

Each reader will experience this poem differently. I initially assumed the glabella, a word too obscure for spell check to recognize, was a flower. Turns out it’s the bit of the face, just above the nose, uniquely sited to receive the baseball strike. “Immured,” another word I couldn’t define with confidence, belongs here too; I’ll let you discover why on your own. 

“St. Clement,” however, isn’t the only such arresting poem in this book. Again and again, McKenna slaps you with the trenchant observation, that sudden realization of what is, as in this description (in “Anniversary Dress”) of a past relationship:

when I was the thing
that came before recognition
a hand on the face
before you even realize
you’ve been hit

Tender, attentive to small moments of meaning within and beyond the places the poet once pushed or simply didn’t pay attention, this is poetry that, at its best, forces readers to reconsider their own histories. In “We Crossed It,” when Vancouver Island-born McKenna (Chenille or Silk) refers to “a father / so unlike / his namesake / this sentence / ought to be/ left blank,” we think back to our own parents, the places they missed us and we them. 

Yet the poet’s concern, in this work, is less for others than for herself, and specifically for her particular physicality. What can her body carry? In McKenna’s luminous evocations, everything from a mother’s justified fear for herself to the memory of sexual assaults in parking lots and by men who betray the narrator’s trust. This same body, at the end of the poet’s capable fingers, can also enact its story of ambivalence at pregnancy loss, and sorrow and fury at “this enduring and unremarkable illness,” left unnamed, that disables the writer in “Close Your Eyes to Block Out the Sun.” 

McKenna has an eye, here and throughout the book, not just for the words a poem contains but for how they look on the page. In “Spider Legs,” a concrete poem, each line forms half of a Y the height of the page, like a pair of spread legs. “Close Your Eyes to Block Out the Sun” too takes a concrete form, a set of steps with each subsequent line another tab to the right—

                         the months climb up
          as a pyramid

A gold star, as McKenna knows, isn’t only a description of a lesbian who never strayed. It can also be a seal of approval, the child’s perfect homework or reward for number of days chores are done. It can refer to a positive online review or to an assessment of a lover, like the narrator’s in “Gold Star Redux.” Most of all, it describes the experience of reading this collection, the gleam of gold amid the dross. 

[Editor’s note: the review title is adapted from Emma McKenna’s March 2026 interview with Bennett Malcolmson in Periodicities.]

Carellin Brooks is the author, most recently, of Learned (Book*hug, 2022), a book of poetry chronicling her concurrent experiences at Oxford University and in the London lesbian sadomasochistic underworld in the 1990s. [Editor’s note: Learned, was reviewed in BCR by Linda Rogers. She has reviewed recent books by Zena Sharman, Wendy Donawa, Eva Kolacz, Chelene Knight, Catherine Owen, Erin Steele, Jes Battis, Jen Currin, Daniel Zomparelli, Dina Del Bucchia, Mx. Sly, Debbie Bateman, Michael V. Smith, Buffy Cram, and Maryanna Gabriel for BCR.]

*

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 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.

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