I was kindly offered an arc of Margo LaPierre’s Ajar a while back, but life (new motherhood) has made me a bit slow in writing up my thoughts. So here’s my long-awaited review of my friend and fellow editor’s latest poetry collection.
Ajar by Margo LaPierre
The figures in “The Grapefruit: A Model of Time Squeezed through Consciousness” appeared on my social media feed years ago. I do not recall if it was poet Margo LaPierre herself who shared it or if some reader was posting a page from it’s original publication, but I remembered the grapefruit, the screen door, the flattened circle of time. This “zipper model” is also representative of how LaPierre’s sophomore poetry collection functions: a narrative throughline of neurodivergence and suicidality expands through recurring images and layered forms to create an all-at-onceness that demands attention.
“A Model of Time Squeezed through Consciousness” is but one of five Grapefruit poems in the collection. These, like many of the other poems in Ajar, build on the discussion of time—“I can gut the child / of sweet orange and pomelo / but can’t separate / then from now, / pith from flesh” (“The Grapefruit: Alarm”)—but stay grounded through tactile description. Hands slide along hipbones or through various fabrics, feet “stomp flat-foot heel-first into the kitchen” (“The Grapefruit: Noon”), and clothes are selected and discarded. These domestic details, along with an at times conversational tone—“where was I? / Domestic objects? Oh, yes. Bad dreams” (“The Grapefruit: Assembly”)—provide a stark contrast to many of the portrayals of psychosis in pop culture (though note that “Dear Rue” acknowledges that good representation can exist) .
Alongside these grapefruit poems, LaPierre includes sections of prose that detail her experience with bipolar disorder. This history begins with perhaps-unexpected contradiction—“Early in the summer of 2008—a very good year—I attempt suicide spontaneously in the kitchen” (“Swimmingly”)—and details how this disorder lives alongside “drinking, clubbing, having fun” (“Seriously, It’s All Going Splendidly”), friendships, romance, hospitalization, and subsequent attempts. This is serious subject matter, but Ajar does not go without lighthearted, hopeful, and even humorous moments (see “On Friendship” in which the speaker, on a stretcher headed for an emergency truck, flips off a friend for not allowing her to wear dancing heels to the hospital).
LaPierre also includes centos, untitled italicized passages, and poems that play with line spacing and alignment. This variety makes for interesting reading and demonstrates LaPierre’s comfort in different forms, which can likely be at least partially attributed to reading widely. Ajar certainly creates a portrait of a well-read poet: aside from borrowing lines from other Canadian poets for her centos, LaPierre begins other poems with epigraphs and writes after other poems. This isn’t showy, nor does it feel like a deliberate attempt to market fellow poets (though I’m sure LaPierre would not hesitate to uplift literary colleagues); instead this feels like a demonstration of the confession “Because my mind went, I went to books. Because I went to books my mind didn’t go too far” (“Learning Curve”).
Also repeated throughout the collection is the idea of haunting and being haunted. “Asterisks,” an early poem in the collection, introduces the subject: “an intimidating entity haunted / from behind the cast iron woodstove. / I made a habit of saying hi / as I passed, to be polite” (“Asterisks”). And though LaPierre states early that “I haunted me,” readers may still feel rewarded when this apparition by the stove comes full circle in “Entity”: “I realize I am here / behind the stove’s cast iron hulk. I am the haunting entity. / I am watching that teenage girl / tip her head to me, politely, / and say hi.”
Remarkably well balanced, Ajar pairs prose and lyric poems, dark and light topics, borrowed lines and wholly original text, to discuss womanhood, psychosis, time, and memory. It is thoughtful and thought provoking, well worth setting aside some time to sit by a window to read with a cup of tea.