Stickboy: A Novel in Verse

Shane Koyczan

House of Parlance

Stickboy: A Novel in Verse, by Shane Koyczan (House of Parlance), is the story of a teenager who is raised by his grand­par­ents and is beaten up and threat­ened at school. When the fam­ily moves to a new town in the Okanagan Valley of B.C., the boy’s hope that he can start a new life is quashed when kids at the new school pick on him too. This is where the story takes on its moral com­plex­ity and its rel­e­vance: in an effort to defend him­self from bul­lies, the boy begins to bully the kids around him. The nar­ra­tive is filled with punches, bruises, scars, cuts, razors, clue­less and antag­o­nis­tic teach­ers, and indif­fer­ent stu­dents who stand by as spec­ta­tors to the boy’s mis­ery and strug­gle. Stickboy is not as lyri­cal as Koyczan’s last release, Visiting Hours, a col­lec­tion of poems writ­ten with gusto and vigour and rec­om­mended as a book of the year by both the Globe and Mail and the Guardian in 2005. Here the author is more con­cerned with story and atmos­phere, and with the mind­set of bul­lies, vic­tims and their spec­ta­tors; the sub­dued style fits the sub­ject and the length of the book very well. As promised in the sub­ti­tle, the book is writ­ten in verse, which is good enough to keep the reader’s inter­est for all 173 pages. One curi­ous thing is that Stickboy is pre­sented as a novel, but it reads or per­haps feels more like a mem­oir, which adds to the gen­eral con­fu­sion about the bor­ders between lit­er­ary genres.