Antonyms for Daughter
Jenny Boychuk
Véhicule Press, 2021
Review by Stella Cali
Antonyms for Daughter, Jenny Boychuk’s unflinching debut collection, explores Boychuk’s mother’s addiction and the author’s complex grief after her mother’s death. Like the seasons, this debut collection changes, decays, and feeds. Last season’s growth melts into the forest floor; saplings absorb dormant knowledge. Boychuk’s rich images move through grief and memory, swirling through time like leaves in the wind.
The collection is divided into four sections, three of which are accompanied by a “Postcard”—addressed respectively to “Winter,” “Spring,” and “Autumn.” Through these markers, the collection moves forward in time, progressing through the year. Equally, in each section the reader sees the speaker move through grief and healing. While this seasonal movement is in a way linear, it also engages with the cyclical nature of life and death, growth and change. The absence of the final season—summer—leaves space for what is not yet known—for what is to come, and what is unknowable.
Boychuk engages with the disorientation of loss, intimately blending memory and imagination in her poems; time slows down in this collection, then cuts without warning. In “Another Try at the Truth,” Boychuk places remembered and imagined moments next to each other to create new meaning. The result is ethereal and piercing, an intuitive flow of connections:
I did say no, I won’t be coming home
to take care of you this time: once I
watched a loon glide the entire length
of the bay underwater: she died
and I came home…
…once, in the lantern
of an apple core, a bear returned to
her cub
Grief blurs time and reality in “That Morning,” which sits in the moments after the speaker is told her mother has passed: “Sadness. Conscious of. Fullness, a dream… / Pull the disarray. Disguise the closet. / Too late. January—of what decade?” At times disconnected from the concrete world, this collection is home to moments of grounding. In these moments, we stand beside the speaker as they look with a steady gaze. In “Errands and Preparations,” the speaker takes their mother’s ashes to the store. “I carry you outside in an antique biscuit tin,” they say; “nestle you carefully in the backseat / of your car, and together we run errands.”
Boychuk explores addiction and trauma across the span of her life, both before and after her mother’s passing. In “Mirrorland,” we see reflections of adolescent shame and pain; the breakable and confusing experience of youth seen through the speaker’s eyes. “I saw for the first time / two glistening stretchmarks | parentheses / around my navel | and knew / that my mother had invented mirrors.” “Doctor’s Appointment, After Her Death” sees Boychuk recounting a struggle with a different kind of inheritance: with the question of how her mother’s addiction, and the genetic aspects of mental illness, will impact her future now that her mother is gone. The poem is structured as a conversation—a series of questions from the doctor and replies from the speaker. “And there is a family history of mental illness?” the doctor asks. The speaker answers:
forgiveness. There are certainties
I expected to inherit. Eyes that flood
with spring’s run-off. A gold cross.
A green felt coat—
but the bottles of white pills
sewn into its pockets, are they mine?
In the wake of her mother’s death, Boychuk is left to sort through what was left to her—both material and medical. Later in the collection, Boychuk returns to this process of sorting and cataloguing as a tool to deal with grief. The completion of this process marks the transition to a new season. “I have done the chores of remembrance,” she writes in “New Inventory,” “the filling of boxes, envelopes, and photo frames. / I have recorded the milestones of death.” She goes on to compare the marking of milestones to a baby’s firsts; the way a mother saves her child’s first pair of shoes, or a lock of baby hair. In this comparison, coming at the end of the collection, Boychuk brings us back to the cyclical nature of change—to a daughter’s shift into the next season of her life.
Blunt and unyielding in its reckoning with pain and trauma, this collection uses form to convey nuance, as exemplified in “Degrees of Duality.” Here, Boychuk presents us with an alternative narrative to the poem itself; crossed-out opposites to the words the speaker eventually settles on. The result is a tangible experience of holding conflicting emotions in the same body. We are forced to consider the possible truth of both narratives—the significance of what the speaker chooses to strike through:
I escaped like heat from a wound scar.
…There, on the pine-grim shore, I builtcollapsed a home from the disbelief
that I could alter accept any world sold to me
Intimate and nuanced, this collection mirrors the complicated nature of the relationship to which it is dedicated. Through expert skill and a steady gaze, Boychuk has crafted a collection of poems that stay with us long after we have closed the book.
Stella Cali is a queer writer and artist completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and sel̓íl̓witulh Nations.