ONION MAN
Description
Onion Man is a sparse and intense series of linked poems told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl working for the summer at a corn-canning factory. The poems follow her relationships with her factory job, her boyfriend, her alcoholic mother, her terminally ill grandfather, and the man who every night “peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple.” Reviews "There are topics that authors explore which have the ability to transcend boundaries - cultural, socio-economic, and geographic - because they are experiences that know no boundaries, ones that most readers will identify and connect with, whether based on personal experience or second-hand knowledge. Alcoholism. Teen drinking and drug use and sex. Infidelity. Families split by fissures. Alzheimer's Disease. Kathryn Mockler guides her readers through the waters of several of these universal topics with equal measures of grit and grace in her debut collection of untitled, linked poems titled Onion Man." Read More Dawn Leas, Contributing Editor of Poet's Quarterly, June 30, 2012 "Like all good writers, Mockler shows more than she tells and in as few well-chosen words as possible. "In all,/the world/ is just/ really/ sad and/ lonely," she writes in one poem. Occupying a tiny corner on the page, the vast white space of the page communicates the emptiness and isolation of the narrator. Her economy of language also echoes a teenager's own laconic verbiage, as well as the futility, outrage and excitement that mark the years leading up to adulthood." Amy Stupavsky, Broken Pencil, 55, Spring 2012 “In Onion Man Kathryn Mockler takes an age-old metaphor and applies it to the construction and consumption of the book: each page turned a layer peeled away, revealing through subtraction a poignant coming-of-age story and a razor-sharp dissection of gender and class relations set in late-1980s Ontario. Unlike much of the ‘work writing’ popular at that time, Mockler’s single stanza texts, solid as the cans of corn her narrator pushes down the line, transcend the story of their production, allowing for overtones many of us will recognize from our own teenage years. Wise, honest, familiar and insightful, this is a book I will read more than once.” Michael Turner, author of Hard Core Logo and The Pornographer’s Poem “With Onion Man, Mockler does for the Pillsbury factory what Dante did for hell. But Mockler is funnier. Nearly every piece in this epic, romantic novel-in-verse cracked me up and, like the best comedians, Mockler breaks your heart while she makes you laugh. Her deadpan wit is dead-on and her understated insight is fathoms deep. You've never read a book of poetry like this.” Sharon McCartney, author of For and Against and The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder “Onion Man's young heroine hands us small details from her workaday small town to prove that some of our best lessons are learned the hard way—sometimes we better ourselves by counter-example—and, truer still, that some hard living has nothing to teach us at all. Mockler can't hide anything in lines this clean and spare. Onion Man delivers a bold, candid voice. It's a book of brave choices.” Michael V. Smith, author of What You Can’t Have and Progress "Onion Man, Kathryn Mockler’s forthcoming poetry collection from Tightrope Books, is a series of untitled, linked poems that take on the force and breadth of a novel. The eighth untitled poem depicts a typical evening of a teenage girl working at a corn-canning factory with her boyfriend, Clinton. Throughout the poem, Mockler explores a conflict between the unnatural setting of the factory and the narrator’s yearning for connection and comfort." Read More Kelli Deeth, author of The Girl Without Anyone, October 26, 2011 Poetry November 2011 144 pages Tightrope Books Cover Art by David Poolman Available on Amazon.ca or Amazon.com ONION MAN
NEWS AND EVENTS Open Book Toronto: Word on the Street, Toronto, 2012
"Kathryn Mockler read poems from The Onion Man. The protagonist and narrator, a young female factory worker, offered up seemingly simple descriptions of her daily life that got big reactions from the crowd, like the wage gap between workers who had been with the factory under old ownership (~$20 an hour) and newer workers like her (~$6.50)." —Amanda Miller, Open Book Toronto Read More about the day's events and The Vibrant Voices of Ontario Tent at Open Book Toronto ONION MAN & REVERSE COWGIRL LAUNCH London, Ontario - December 2, 2011
Forest City Gallery hosted a great launch for Onion Man and David Whitton's short story collection The Reverse Cowgirl. Special guest Christine Walde read from her chapbook Black Car.
Photos courtesy of The Forest City Gallery. |
Buy ONION MAN at these retailers:
    ONION MAN REVIEWS
Poet's Quarterly Broken Pencil Western News Radio Canada International: BIBLIO-FILE The Telegraph Journal A Long Story Short What's in a Book Excerpt of Onion Man
Clinton and I take off our motorcycle helmets and have a smoke before we go in. Heat from the tarmac rises like steam from coffee. My feet burn from blisters, from steel-toed boots. The factory doors are as heavy as the doors of Simpson- Sears. The warm air makes our skin damp, and it’s as hard to breathe in here as it is in a bathroom after a hot shower. We walk past the Yugoslavian women on the line who wear white coats, plastic gloves, hairnets. We make sure our hard hats are in place in case the foreman sees us. We walk to the warehouse—end of the line. Only three women work here: Clinton’s mom on the computer, Brenda in the lab, and me. Clinton works the Britestack, and I stand across from him for ten hours watching unlabelled cans of corn. I make sure each one is in place so he can move them a thousand at a time with a magnet, off the conveyor belt, and down to the forklift drivers. It is so loud in here. Clinton and I scream just to hear each other. Half the time, I have no idea what he is saying. |
| KATHRYN MOCKLER |
|
