When I first opened Suzanne Buffam’s book Past Imperfect (Anansi), I thought it might strive in a similar way to Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon by Nicole Brossard. In the first poem, “Another Bildungsroman,” the speaker grows up, leaves home, falls in and out of love, goes to France and comes home—all in nineteen lines, and it works. Even though this pace is not maintained throughout (some poems meander over details, and some tell whole stories in a page), there is a riskiness and surprise in Buffam’s poems that keep them interesting.
Jill Boettger writes poetry and nonfiction from her home in Calgary, where she lives with her husband and two kids. She teaches in the Department of English, Languages and Cultures at Mount Royal University and is a frequent contributor to Geist.
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