BLACK ICE

It was the laneway in January that frightened me most;

the reaching-out branches of leafless trees; rumblings

of the all night streetcar; the one or two people walking

throught the dark and the snow stirring: all as it should be

when you have something to hide.  It was the cold, grey

clouds; and framed in a square of light, it was the man

in the second floor window yelling at someone

I could not see.  It was the way his fists pounded

the air and his shirt was off, thrown over the back

of a chair; the man was lean, his pounding and pointing

unyielding.  It felt as if the someone was me, unsteady

on my feet.  It was the falling, darkness and falling,

the time-crested glow of the moon reflected

in a sheet of ice and the thud that I heard was me

on my side looking up through the cold.  It was

the light gone from the window and silence

except the occassional streetcar rolling by.

It was the lane changing, deepening its shadow,

and I wanted to pull the ice like a blue-black

blanket over my feet and legs and fall asleep

because sometimes sleep is vertigo, the drawn-out

stutter of a radiant heart, the shifting plates of darkness.

It was stars, the upside-down naked-with-trees laneway at night.

(From: Narcissus Unfolding: Frontenac House, 2011)

 

06 February 2012


The Girl On The Escalator (short stories)

Synopsis

The charcacters in these eleven stories live in a world upside down.  From the young professional who leaves her high-powered job to explore street life as a graffiti artist, to the gay man who falls in love with a woman, to the spin class fanatic who learns there's a fine line between addiction, these excessive and radical characters create pandemonium wherever they go.  Inspired by everyday people riding the TTC, Jim Nason has crafted a collection of gender- and expectation-bending stories that reveals the extraordinary and often heartbreaking truths behind ordinary life.

Narcissus Unfolding (poetry)

Synopsis

Narcissus Unfolding is a love poem - a poem to the love that goes on in the life of the people a loved one leaves behind, a poem to the body, even as the body betrays us.  It is a book that inspires its readers to re-examine how they are loved in a world that's often disappointingly real when compared to the ideals we carry within us, sometimes to our own detriment.  Yet, once accepted, once understood, real, flawed, failing love is seen in all its unfolded glory - and embraced.

The Fist of Remembering (poetry)

Synopsis

A collection of poems that confront, over and over, the horror and mystery of a lover dying of cancer.  Hating his survivor's eloquence, but using it, Nason achieves something like revenge against the forces of darkness.'

 

The Housekeeping Journals (novel)

Synopsis

In the Housekeeping Journals, the self-oppressed narrator, Tony, takes on a homemaking job to put himself through university as a social work student.  He performs domestic tasks traditionally deemed ‘women’s work’, and in the land of laundry and dirty dishes finds himself involved in the complex lives of his clients who live with addiction, AIDS, mental illness, poverty and shame. 

Chapters are introduced by Mrs. Neatson’s  Easy Steps to Domestic Bliss for the Busy Housewife, a voice from the nineteen-fifties offering tips to the Lady of that era.  These tips, with their surreal tone of glamour and richness, run parallel with the myth-making, real-life survival needs of the novel’s characters – an elderly, crippled man living with his drug-dealing grandson; a demented drag queen about to get evicted from his apartment; a mother holding the hand of her dying son as she reflects on her youth and her lost lover.

Although Tony is 6’ 5”, in his carnivalesque world-turned-upside-down, he perceives himself as small and invisible.  In the Housekeeping Journals, he “cleans house” as he explores childhood memories and his grief and guilt surrounding his younger brother Stephen’s death at the hands of his violent and mean-spirited stepfather, Frankie Pearce.  Tony learns through the courage of his clients, and ultimately emerges with grace and humour as an emotionally daring and sexually adventurous man.