“There is a poltergeist in my body, biting and cutting from within,” (19) writes Ashley-Elizabeth Best in her hauntingly beautiful collection of poetry, Bad Weather Mammals, published by ECW Press.
Drawing inspiration from her experiences as a disabled individual caught up in the maladaptive bureaucracy of various social services systems, Best guides her reader through her work by becoming “both story and storyteller” (46). There is an inevitably confessional nature to her poetry, and ghosts, mental illness, and bodily autonomy are just a few of the themes she weaves into the forty poems that comprise the collection. Indeed, as she writes in “Songs for Rejecting Boys at Parties,” “My inbox is an archive of confessions,” (11) and we have been given access to a few of her lyrical files.
Like the title suggests, our mammalian nature and evolutionary musings on blue whales commonly sprout in Best’s work, especially in poems like “An Atlas of Pelvic Inspections” and “Proud Flesh.” She ponders on the purpose of vestigial organs, and writes on the significance of fossils as follows:
“Consider your teeth in the Earth’s belly, their usefulness
in decoding what you may never know about yourself” (55).
Considering the larger scope of evolution doesn’t just serve to ground us to our primitive reality as multicellular organisms, but prompts us to acknowledge our humble existence in an ever-expanding cosmos. There is an element of existentialism in Bad Weather Mammals, which echoes with a disillusionment from Kafkaesque systems that exhaust the disabled and traumatized body. “Drift” especially speaks to this realization of our minute selves and the tides of time, or as Best describes them, “epochs of compressed / dust speak the facts of decay” (52).
Experimenting with dynamic styles of poetry, Best crafts ghazals, pastiches, and prose that showcase her ability to tie mode to meaning in her collection. Some of my favourite poems in Bad Weather Mammals are presented as government notices that are modified to reflect the artificial, impersonal, and insufferable tones of organizational policing. The Ontario Disability Support Program questionnaires (34, 50) are particularly memorable as they highlight how gender becomes a complicating factor in a disabled individual’s journey to secure social support. As Best writes,
“if a woman cohabitates with a man there
Must / exist spousal dependency / a choiceness existence, identity
hidden in empty pockets” (34).
Elsewhere, in poems like “Wellness Check” and “How to Write a Character Witness Letter for a Parole Board (or Letter)” she observes how systems that are ostensibly in place to provide support to those in need inevitably alienate them from those they love. The sterile nature of these medical and infrastructural procedures is captured authentically when she writes,
“Early in life, the world became a waiting room.
Waiting in hospitals for your mother; in lobbies of cop shops
and courtrooms for your brothers; for social workers to stop
asking so many questions; for someone to say if anything you
said was worth hearing” (46).
Despite Best’s incredibly candid descriptions of sexual and intimate partner violence, dysfunctional family dynamics and the “unkindness of biochemicals” (4), there is a certain playfulness in her poems. These feel like an invitation to her reader to find humour in the mundane—in “My Mother Stops Breathing Beside Me in the Night,” she describes the CPR dummy as “the most kissed face of all time / with none of the love” (32).
Tender moments appear elsewhere in poems like “In Praise of Nieces,” where Best provides a glimpse of her relationship with a beloved toddler. She indulges, through vivid imagery, in showcasing the innocence of nurturing a young life so dear to her. While systems around her may fail, she seeks refuge in the loving “perimeters” (43) of this relationship—“I want this to be the place my memory goes, where I can take her later when she’s taller than me, wiser to this new world” (43). Memory, and the act of remembering, are recurrent focal points throughout the collection, which is in itself a testimony of Best’s lived memories.
In her last poem, “Introducing Man,” she ties together the multi-faceted themes that compose Bad Weather Mammals to posit an astute observation; “within our nature are traces of animal nostalgia; killers” (69). This feels like a profound way to close a collection that journeys through homo erectus’ history in Eritrea, to hospital waiting rooms in Ontario and bathroom floors in Montreal. Though we may have come far from our early mammalian days on a different continent, perhaps an innate provocation of violence still reflects in our bodies, systems, and ways.
As I read Bad Weather Mammals amidst headlines that report increased legislative scrutiny on the rights of queer and disabled individuals, I am amazed by the pertinence of Best’s writing. Each poem illustrates how the intersection of various identities—femininity, disability, trauma—in one’s life leaves an invisible stamp that defines how they are treated politically and interpersonally. Through the chaos of navigating systems designed to fail us, Best suggests that “you are your own containment… / It’s enough to show up for yourself” (66), which is perhaps something we all need to be reminded of.