[.ca] Missing Children (ISBN 0771024258)

Amazon.ca:
Missing Children, Lynn Crosbie's first book of poetry since 1998's deservedly acclaimed Queen Rat, is loosely based upon a dark e-mail from one of the author's friends and the first four songs of Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Hits. In practice, however, this long narrative poem is more like a Nick Cave song: it is full of gallows humour; sleazy, sinister, trashy characters; and coolly rendered physical and psychological violence. It is also her most fully realized poetic work to date. Crosbie opens with the e-mail that inspired Missing Children, which describes a man arrested for a strange sort of crime: "For years he'd been collecting newspaper clippings about missing children and unsolved murders--then on the child's birthday or the anniversary of the murder, he would call the family of the victim and pretend to have vital information on the case or to know the child's whereabouts and say he would call and tell more. And then never call again." This isn't quite the premise of the book, but it's near enough. Crosbie elaborately develops the figure of a man who is obsessed with missing children, collects their cast-off artifacts (mittens, McDonald's toys, and the like), sends bizarre letters to their parents about their possible whereabouts, and even organizes a football team for prepubescent girls--without knowing the rules of the game. She gives him an extensive and creepy inner life, a failed marriage, and a love affair with a waitress named Wendy who collects newspaper clippings concerning "what she called Sad stories about / the elderly." Crosbie's free verse narrative is taut and aphoristic. Her stanzas are seldom longer than two lines, and as a result the story moves through a tightly controlled series of simple images and simple ideas that sharply expose her characters' deranged inner lives: A Seurat of carpet beetles in the bathroom sink, the hardware store owner cooking with pork fat on a hot plate, Wendy's ass growing like Jiffy Pop, something new every day. I'll go crazy if I stay here, I tell her, and she frowns over her macaroni-marshmallow casserole. The wooden box rattles when I move it under a loose plank. I hunch over my dinner; Wendy spoons 1000 Islands into the salad bowl. The display of cultural detritus and sexual violence is vintage Crosbie. Anyone who enjoyed Queen Rat needs this book, and readers of Crosbie's fiction will find Missing Children to be an inviting introduction to her poetry. --Jack Illingworth