Notes on Leaving

Stephanie McKenzie is a visiting assistant professor of English at Sir
Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is
the editor and co-publisher of However Blow the Winds: An Anthology of
Poetry and Song from Newfoundland & Labrado

Notes on Leaving is a sensual depiction of a young girl’s journey
through rites of passage, loss of innocence, and the development of a
stiff upper lip.

The collection is divided into four parts. Part 1, “Point of Exit,”
introduces us to the memories of the young female narrator, who grew up
in British Columbia “on top of a mountain.” The book does not spiral
into nostalgic romanticism, but suspends its reader between beauty and
pending danger and loss.

In Part 2, “A Rock Ballad,” the poem “Haircut, Age Eleven”
depicts a young woman who, fearing her changing body, cuts her hair
“short and close to the head, / until she [can] feel her skull / round
and certain.” In this section’s title poem, adolescence will not
endure, though a voice ironically croons “Let it always be like
this”; narrator and friends, drunk in Tim Hortons after a community
dance, “hold the smooth beating fish of boys’ tongues / in [their]
mouths.”

The latter half of Part 3, “Beg and Choose,” as well as Part 4,
“Taken,” record the voice and fear (and strength) of a young woman
who has left her world of frogs and mountains and ventured into other
countries and states of mind: “I’ve already decided; I won’t /
come home. I will have my belly / oiled with jasmine by long-haired /
women, blessed by each holy man. / I will birth her without pain, /
premature, and leave her, slick / and bathed in fluid, in the copper /
bowl of a beggar.”

Notes on Leaving is Laisha Rosnau’s first book of poetry. It leaves
readers hoping for much, much more.