Matronalia by A.B. Dillon Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $20.00 ISBN 978-1-77187-153-2 “Life had not taught you that you were a girl yet.” ” … my brain crawled with biting ants of recrimination.” “I am many diaries, and I know where all my keys are, except a few.” “I/always/worry/about/the/horses.” Rarely does a first book make me question: what is this magic? I need to know the who and how. When done exceptionally well, poetry, especially, can stir a cell-and-bone dance like no other genre. It’s just happened. Calgary poet A.B. Dillon’s Matronalia slices into the depths of what it is to mother a daughter, and to be mothered by a woman whose ideologies differ greatly from her own. Dillon illuminates what most keep hidden: the fear, the disasters, the terrible responsibility, the drowning in overwhelmedness, the non-understanding, the guilt (on page 78, “Forgive me” is the sole text). “You have wandered into my ward/and infected me” she writes of a young daughter. She later admits that “it becomes impossible to breathe”. While alternating between poems addressed to “you” (presumably the daughter to whom the book’s dedicated) and poems about being quite differently daughtered herself, Dillon weaves…