REVIEWER: Wendy Donawa is grateful to live on the unceded territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt peoples, and to see the Salish Sea and the Sooke Hills from the window over her desk. Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions is her second collection.
Poet Wendy Donawa
unpacking the poem:
Regional reviewers focus on regional poems
Reviewer Wendy Donawa unpacks a different poem every month. She examines the poem in a way she hopes is helpful for readers and other poets to understand how craft works in a particular poem, for a particular effect.
june 2024: catherine st denis
“Baby Fentanyl”
After the funeral
his mother showed me a picture of him
as a preschooler, sleeping, torso bent
over the bed while his shoed feet still rested
on the floor. So cute
the way his little face
smooshed against the quilt,
the way his arms angled
beside him, as though he’d been told,
Hands up! So cute the way
sleep hijacks children—during a mouthful
of lasagne, as they push a tricycle’s pedal,
between strokes of a dog’s back, or,
she told me, after they’d been naughty
and sent to their room to cry. So cute,
I thought, this picture of when he first
started learning how to press his perfect cheek
against shame, to slip from between the arms
of consciousness, ecstatic, all
by himself.
“Baby Fentanyl” first appeared in ARC Poetry Magazine 103 (Spring 2024)
Catherine St. Denis (she/her) lives, writes, sings, teaches, and parents on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples. Her work recently appeared in Rattle, The Malahat Review, Grain, Arc, Canthius, and The Humber Literary Review. Catherine was a finalist for PEN Canada's New Voices Award in both 2022 and 2023. She has work forthcoming in Biblioasis’ Best Canadian Poetry 2025.
Unpacking “Baby Fentanyl” by Catherine St Denis.
“Baby Fentanyl’’ 's title and its first two lines clarify this poem’s setting, and the “plot”, but its heart-searing tragedy unfolds in other ways.
The poem’s speaker quickly veers from a devastating beginning—the mother at her child’s funeral-- to a detailed perusal of an early childhood photo. “So cute”, the little boy collapsed in sleep, shoes hanging off the bed. And who has not felt a sentimental frisson gazing at the endearing boneless sprawl of small children stumbling into sleep?
The speaker’s “so cute” is repeated three times, each repetition a presentiment of layered meaning, daring use of a cliché most writers wouldn’t risk using even once. “So cute” it’s “as though he’d been told, /Hands up!” begins playfully, but on second reading comes to seem slightly ominous. And “hijack” is not a tender word, not quite “so cute.” Sleep that comes “after they’d been naughty/and sent to their room to cry” now seems to foreshadow future delinquency and danger, although this is surely not what the mother consciously intended. Finally, shockingly, “So cute, I thought”: the speaker’s intrusion, she sees a path of heedlessness that leads from conscious life (“against shame”) to abandonment, to fentanyl’s ecstasy.
Finally, the crushing impact of doubled meaning: “All by himself” is a phrase we use to praise the toddler learning to use the potty or to put on his own shoes. But the lost boy is now forever isolated, “all by himself.”
Catherine St Denis’ poem is a fine example of the power of understatement. The poem’s opening briskly informs the reader of the tragedy, but quickly moves to a detailed description that appears to have little appropriateness to the present loss. However, it arouses in the reader passionate emotional responses of parental love, concern, shock-- every parent’s worst nightmare. Thus, the reader shares more fully that shock as the poem’s end completes its beginning; the boy has slipped forever from “the arms of consciousness” (and from the arms of his mother) and is truly “all by himself.”