The Bite // Adèle Barclay

Adèle Barclay ruminates on duty, obligation, diplomacy and joy in reviewing as part of our guest edited month, “Roles and Functions of Criticism: Comments on our Review Culture."

The best review I never published was when I bit a book out of frustration. I took the corner of a poetry collection I had been tasked with reviewing for an academic journal and put it in my mouth. I chomped down: a blunt pointillist half-moon perforated its glossy white cover.

I was angry with the author, a poet who wrote with complete sincerity about how it always snows at Christmas, much to the delight of young children. I was angry with my editor because he had written about this poet in his dissertation, and so the review seemed inservice to some pact I didn’t want to be a part of. I regressed to a childlike pre-verbal state—like when I was a baby and would bite those around me. Once I learned to speak, I explained to my parents that my biting had stemmed from my inability to express my needs. Though the bite I had bestowed on the book left me feeling sheepish, I was also satisfied by it.

I slogged through a diplomatic treatise on the book, slyly letting the poet’s lines speak for themselves. Writing the review felt like practicing a set of piano scales in a difficult key. I went from stumbling to nimbly plucking my way through uneven terrain, trying to let slip an ounce of pathos into an otherwise mechanical trajectory. I channeled my frustration into critique despite my misgivings about what kind of space this collection was taking up. Expression—whether in the form of a bite or words—feels good and necessary.

I’ve experienced review culture as deeply steeped in obligation. This sense of duty isn’t necessarily awful, but I want to press on our taking-your-vitamins attitude to reviewing. I’ve donned the role of dutiful critic. I am certain dialling it in as an obedient disciple is how I got through my PhD in a timely fashion. And like any job, being a reviewer demands some measure of responsibility. As a burnt-out over-achiever, I’m curious about the impulses that underpin our sense of duty, and where they come from.

I also wonder if treating reviews as purely obligatory dampens criticism’s heartbeat. I want to make space for both responsibility and pleasure in criticism. And by pleasure I don’t mean simply praising a book you enjoyed, although that’s valid, too. I mean those flashes of emotion you get when you read something and want to figure out what it means to you, what it means to the place and time you’re living through.

I much prefer to strongly react to something than feel indifferent about it. Books, TV, and films that rouse me to love or hatred are a joy to critique. I’d rather dislike something utterly than find it mediocre. But even then, something failing to move me in either extreme… oddly moves me. I want to know why a piece of culture leaves me cool—another kind of puzzle that’s a pleasure to deliberate. Isn’t that what a review is:keeping the party going after the book has ended so you don’t have to go home right away?

From 2016-18, I was the Critic in Residence for Canadian Women in Literary Arts, where it was my job to review books by women and non-binary authors to counter the gendered gap in review culture. The importance of that task came even more into focus during a time in which CanLit was rapidly immolating. While the bodies and lawsuits piled up, I wrote reviews and conducted interviews in an effort to ensure there were critical discussions about marginalized authors’ writing: novels, children’s books, poetry collections, graphic novels, and cultural criticism. Despite everything that was going on, these books, which addressed a whole assortment of issues in a wide range of voices, were still being published.

I don’t want to give my critical writing a smug sense of importance. I want to emphasize that going back to the work of women, queer, and racialized folks during that precarious time felt like an anchor. This criticism aligned with my sense of responsibility regarding dedicating critical space to the work of marginalized authors. It also forced me to dig into said work and think deeply about the ideas and styles I was encountering. Turning to reading and reviewing reignited my faith in literature during a period of massive disillusionment with literary culture.

The frustration that resulted in my childish book-biting stemmed from a crossfire of duties—my editor’s allegiance to this poet, my understanding of reviews as service to the broader literary community, my sense that it was important to allot critical space to writers more interesting than entitled white men. I was frustrated because I felt not only muzzled, but also stripped of the innate joy I find in writing and reviewing.

I write to find my way back to feeling and to figure out what I know, carving out pathways that weren’t there before or that got blocked. Sometimes I’m too numb to write poetry or lyric essays or fiction.Meanwhile criticism has weirdly always been there for me no matter my state—the sense of duty gets me out of bed and the pleasure of parsing and mapping out meaning reminds me I’m part of a larger, living conversation.

ADÈLE BARCLAY's writing has appeared in Vallum, The Heavy Feather Review, glitterMOB, The Pinch, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Puritan, PRISM international, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and The Walrus' 2016 Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016) won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her second collection of poetry, Renaissance Normcore, was recently published by Nightwood Editions. She was Arc Magazine's 2018-19 Poet in Residence and Canadian Women in Literary Arts 2016 Critic in Residence. She is an editor at Rahila's Ghost Press and the 2020 Writer in Residence at the University of the Fraser Valley.