Wolf Sonnets

R. P. LaRose, a member of the Metis Nation of Alberta, delivers 48 taut sonnets in his seamless debut collection, Wolf Sonnets, unpacking what it is to live, and love, in a land “Stolen the Christian way.” LaRose acknowledges the intersecting complexities of identity and poetics—“We’re never real enough for real. / We’re never fake enough for fake”—through the freedom of contemporary sonnets that range from 10 to 20 lines and make their mark via meta self-definition:

These wolf sonnets. Made by a fake.
Fake poems, fake book. Fake love, fake weight.
Make a home in this fake country.
Fake for the taking. Fake for free.

LaRose tracks a colonized and patriarchal world in which “cops in armoured vests harass / teenage sleepers on the bus / who rest quietly and breathe like us,” and “suspects” are “8- / and-20-million white folk, deadly”; where there are “blood-built neighbourhood[s],” “the ocean’s / face” is “a trillion plastic bottles / tossed inside the maw,” and “forests grieve.” But these are not passive spaces: “We wail. / Hold no say, no love, and no thanks / with the builders, priests, thieves, and cheats.” Or, more directly:

You are cordially invited
to leave. Back to the beauties of
your mother, colossal Europe;
all the violence on her wares […]

The speaker seeks spaces, literal and metaphorical, freed from occupation: “The sky is the ground / because we can’t see border lines.” The past—both its wildness and its violences—also offers uncolonized territory, symbolized in part by the wolves who populate these poems: “Pups, moms, dads, uncles, grandparents, / everyone saying something, of course.” The contemporary world of The Simpsons, Star Trek, Foucault, and Tranströmer is also the world of the speaker, raised amid the cultural interfaces of a colonized land, where the artist loses another kind of freedom:

I was made in someone else’s home.
No matter what I write, I think
This should have been a love poem.

That this stunning, book-length sonnet sequence does indeed include love poems makes this debut all the more powerful.