Review: Urchin by Evan Hoskins// Jordan Prato

Chapbooks are a publication both concise in form and powerful in delivery. Evan Hoskin’s Urchin is no exception. Urchin’s delivery is intrinsically bound by narratives and curiosities. It bewitches the reader. Though it heads to familiar grounds such as Ottawa and Toronto, we can’t be too confident, as we see Urchin’s world through its own jovial eyes.In “Shadows and the Fang,” Ottawa is not just the Peace Tower and Beavertails but Sparks Street, whose cadence is that of a frantic spider drumming time like a clock. There is a playfulness towards convention throughout the collection, even in pieces as seemingly serious as “These Hospitals Never Change.” Refusing to let the poem slip into sombre desperation with its invocation of the dirty '30s and the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease, Hoskins creates a silly dynamic through Sean the horse which, Hoskin notes, is “not a good name for a horse. Especially a dead one.” Hoskin’s mischievous style and nonconformity appear throughout Urchin’s format, notably through his active use of italics, highlights, crossed out lines, and square brackets, which revitalize words and foster new venues of interpretation. The introduction of square brackets creates mini poems within poems, adding greater layers of analysis.Such playful engagement with the content of lines is paralleled by their transformation into the form of the hands of a clock or the dizzying arrays of ice pellets. Urchin actively defies traditional block form poetry and maximizes the artistic potential within the space of a page.Hoskin’s artistic efficiency extends beyond the poems themselves and appears in its “About the Author” section. Hoskin uses the space not to list achievements or provide a biography, but rather to urge readers to expand their collection beyond white writers and include demographics which are significantly underrepresented on shelves.Urchin’s complexity of form and content is its greatest strength. Littered with symbolism and literary devices, it offers many handholds for accessibility while maintaining a depth that implies there will always be a card in Hoskin’s hand you cannot see. For such a condensed collection of poems, Urchin provides an incredible amount of re-read value. Having read the collection at least a dozen times since November and particular poems even more so, I am still uncovering deeper layers of interpretation and understanding. To anyone with an interest in poetry, I’d encourage an exploration into the enchantingly coy world of Urchin without hesitation.