"If only my cousin had kept off me, kept out of me his brown fly-strop glue, his shot dog-eye cream. Afterwards, he would comb my hair to a wet Elvis point between my eyes and warn me what his wolves would do to me, and where I'd be sent, if I ever told." This experience is at the core of Phil Hall's Trouble Sleeping . It is the source of bad dreams and also, paradoxically, the source of his crisp, luminous text. Trouble Sleeping makes visible the poetry of hopeful despair by remembering a poor working class family of Irish descent, living outside the margins of respectability at the edge of the Laurentian Shield in mid-Northern Ontario in the 1950s. This raw world is seen by a child who is a misfit in it (especially among its brutal, drunken males). That child will eventually come to speak for the plight of unregarded misfits in society at large. "Orthodontics is a class issue" to the writer looking back on a time when it never occurred to his parents that crooked teeth might be fixed - not that they could have afforded it. In Trouble Sleeping , working a variation on the Japanese form of haibun, Hall alternates prose passages with poems that reflect nightmarishly on the interwoven narratives.
Trouble Sleeping
