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.

Poetry
November 2011
144 pages
Tightrope Books
Cover Art by David Poolman
Available on Amazon.ca or Amazon.com

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.”

Review
“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." Continue Reading
—Kelli Deeth, author of The Girl Without Anyone

ONION MAN REVIEWS
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.