This simple book, published for national poetry month, is everything a chapbook should be, except it’s too short. I guess that’s why it’s called a “bitlet”. The six excellent poems are told from the point of view of André Breton’s estranged lover. She was immortalized in his novel, Nadja, but he never visited her after she was institutionalized at the age of twenty-five. Elmslie gives Nadja a powerful and consistent poetic voice in the tradition of Atwood’s Susanna Moodie or Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid. Elmslie has swallowed her character whole, slipped into her skin, and comes perilously close to suffocating. Nadja flings bile at Breton in elegant sentences like, “You entered me like a café, proud of your mine, très artiste”, or “Envying in you always / the slenderness of forgetting”. The poetry here is top notch, “All my money is mad. It slips through my fingers as though it grew scales.” I hope this is just an excerpt of a larger whole because I would love to see more of Elmslie’s Nadja. (AB)
chapbook, 8 pgs, free, Sue Elmslie, above/ground press, RR#1, Maxville, Ontario, K0C 1T0