What You Can't Have.

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Vancouver resident Michael V. Smith is a “comedian, filmmaker, zinester, performance artist, and occasional clown.” This cultural multi-tasker is also one of his community’s “25 most influential queer citizens.” If a reader misses the back cover, that truth will unfold in the first section of this collection.

Since Canadian literature now permits the expression of homosexual feelings, readers may no longer be satisfied with mere articulate revelations. Smith offers plenty of raw biographical fare, but is also capable of inventive playfulness. Such creativity is most apparent in “Sex.” The narrator and his lover create “a child / turned blue / in the womb.” At the poem’s conclusion the couple “stroke his fur / and walk him / thru the neighbourhood / on a collar.” The surrogate child is a dog.

“What a Mind Can Make” is a memoir spiced by a secret understanding between the honest author and the perceptive reader. A tryst between two young boys is interrupted by a “parent’s voice calling Why / don’t you boys play outside / it’s beautiful out there.” Such benign obliviousness adds subtle humour to the poet’s erotic recollections.

Section 2 interprets William Gade Gadney’s photographic studies of 1960s rural Kentucky. The ironically titled “Promise” chronicles that region’s desolation. It is noted that “Even in the far field / there are no tires on the Valiant, weeds / reach the windows.” That hulk becomes a metaphor for the land. The situation is humanized by a view of “the young guy idling in the driver’s seat / watches the road and not the fleshy / stump outside his window.” Smith offers awareness, you supply the social conscience.

It may be tempting to dismiss this author as an artistic “jack of all trades,” but this book proves that he has mastered his work.