Realia

Realia
by Michael Trussler
Published by Radiant Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$20.00 ISBN 9781998926039

As a longtime reviewer, I occasionally receive a book that I quickly discern will require disproportionate time and patience to digest. If, for example, I don’t know what the title means—ie: Realia, by award-winning Regina poet and nonfiction writer Michael Trussler—I can expect that Google’s going to be my friend. In a review of Trussler’s The History Forest, I suggested that reading his complex work is “like walking through a forest under the cape of night”. I’m still mostly in the dark with his latest work, Realia, but surmise that this very perplexity is indeed the point. Non-sequiturs, unfinished lines, seemingly random symbols, footnotes, bizarre juxtapositions (“History = milkshake duck”) … colouring outside the lines is this writer’s style, and he’s nothing if not consistent. I needed to take a deeper dive.

Trussler’s bio reveals that he’s “neuro-divergent,” and there are references to “phobic anxiety,” “OCD,” and “the psych ward [he] spent a week in downtown”. As I toddled through the pieces—frequently stopping to research names and words—and realized that much of what the poet questions is actually reality, I began to fall under the work’s strange spell and stopped looking for logical connections I might report on, like his litany of technological and cinematic references: microphones, voice-over, documentary, copying machine, TV remote, Zoom, mise en scène, database, televisions, film camera, Netflix, smart phones, iPhone, and various films and actors. Or his connection to colours: “The orange-red eyes of oystercatchers”.

In a formidable poem titled “A Grammar of Spontaneity,” Trussler writes:

a bit sketchy but for starters there’s

been a lot of illness in the Family, the one

real job is

to keep, is to keep, is to

avoid ending

up like your father

There are quotes—sometimes mid-poem—from a variety of sources (from Hari Kunzru to Rachel Carson to excerpts from the Journal of Katherine Mansfield),but most of the most effective lines are Trussler’s own:

the moment in which the patient

remembers the mother-of-pearl cliffs of sunlight

asleep on a grandmother’s

bathroom floor—

(C.D. Wright quoting another, unnamed poet’s assertion that “̒Poetry is speech by someone who is in trouble,’” is also stellar.)

It’s about the journey, here, not the destination. These pieces (the book includes prose essays) never feign to make logical sense: the anxiousness that’s often part and parcel of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is represented in this collection. That Trussler, through these pieces, can make a non-OCD reader feel the experience of a busy and often fearful mind—struggling to ascertain the difference between “common” reality and one’s own reality—is testament to his talent and the works’ power.

“Realia,” by the by, has multiple meanings, but most relevant here is this Merriam-Webster adaptation: “̒Realia’ is also sometimes used philosophically to distinguish real things from the theories about them”. Also of note is literary/cultural critic and writer Lauren Berlant’s insightful, book-opening quote: “How does someone stay attached to life while repudiating the world of bad objects?” This question hangs in the air.

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