Gutted [Paperback]

Evie Christie’s Gutted is violent; the reader is frequently confronted with images like “blood-slick knuckles,” or “brain matter and bone fragments exploding”. Yet the violence remains contained and controlled: it does not take over, never bleeds into the gratuitous or the exploitative. Take, for instance, the “Slaughterhouse Sonnet”:

A million smiling Isaacs before you
Stab cherry coin slots into the thick pink collars.
Those who refuse to die, those who twitch, who,
With bloated eye and rancid hoof, take their time
In dying, will of course be shot in the face.
When you’ve been here as long as you’ve been,
They give you the company stopwatch:
Chain link vest, glove, glove, coveralls, light
Jog to station B and a piss takes 15 minutes,
Anything beyond and you’re docked. Don’t even
Think about a quick jerk for Christ sake, do it
On lunch or on the fucking drive in and you
Know for damn sure there’s a God who’s given such
Glorious freedom, endless vistas of blood and bone.

Not a textbook sonnet, perhaps, but an astonishing poem embodying all the qualities that make Christie’s debut collection remarkable: her unabashed, tell-it-as-it-is poetic voice, deft handling of sensitive and shocking subject matter, precocious use of repetition, disregard for taboo, and her empathetic eye.
Christie gives us narratives of a contemporary urban environment: glass and steel and metal twisted in a bus wreck, desperate people driven to bar fights or suicide, domestic and drug abuse, “Porn Stars and Pharmaceuticals”, and the scars left by love. The book jacket claims “this is essentially love poetry”-fair enough, but it is the kind of love that keeps “legs pinched together against buzzing schoolroom/ busy-bodies,” the love of “the doctor who slipped it in first (without the glove) and winked.” Many of the titles imply Christie is forging a new definition for love: “Not a Love Poem”, “Reckoning a Different Kind of Love”, “Zombie Love”.
One of Christie’s most unique talents is her use of point-of-view in these pieces, her ability to shift her speaker between not only male and female perspectives, but any range of experiences contained therein. Men who ogle barmaids, take mistresses, get into bar fights, lose wives, and women who cheat, are cheated on, see unscrupulous psychiatrists, move to the city, marry carpenters-all are treated with the same respect and grace, and rendered with the same precision and raw veracity. And none is spared the scalpel of Christie’s wit and insight.
The only time Christie disappoints is when her drive for concision forces her more personal or character-based poems into hard-to-decipher narratives. To be sure, certain of these confessional poems are brilliant: “Letters Addressed to 745 Palmerston Avenue”, “Sweet Revenge”, and “I Don’t Know, It May Just Be the Weather” pose no problem for the reader and offer tender but unflinching looks at leaving and returning home, dealing with family, and loss-themes to which anyone can relate. Likewise, the love poems addressed to an unspecified second person, as in “Reckoning a Different Kind of Love”:

Not love at all really, but I spent hours
and months drinking gin or beer on your balcony
into daybreak. I wouldn’t tell you how your posture
and stride reminded me of my father’s, or the cool,
ritual way a heart can beat, knowing what is not right,
what it doesn’t want, and beat again.

Other poems, however, delve so far into one individual’s experience that, in their private details, they shut the reader out; “Picking Up My Brother on the Way to Hastings”, “Riding County Road 3”, and “Twenty-Fifth Birthday Suit”, for instance, do not offer enough clues nor broaden sufficiently in scope to be accessible.
That said, Christie’s craft never disappoints. She is at her strongest when she uses repetition; for example, the way she can repeat “I am afraid” in three stanzas of “This Is a Picture of Us” and make it always seem fresh and new in meaning and appropriately beautiful in sound. Her sense of line is exquisite. One notable departure from her standard free verse is “Zombie Love (Haikus)”- a series of haiku poems which are simultaneously macabre reflections on love and heart-felt tributes to zombie flicks. Christie repeats key phrases and images throughout the various haikus to create a surreal and bizarrely affecting poem. Far from being one of the living dead, Gutted is a refreshingly vital and shockingly vicious first book.
Matthew J. Trafford (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

Gutted, Evie Christie’s powerful and harrowing debut, pulses with the rhythms of life, loss, and love. Energized with the language of now and the wide scope of popular culture, while dwelling in Yeats’ “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” — a world where needs are unfulfilled and passions unrequited (or worse) — it also manages to revel in the beauty of fragility and discover awe in the smallest things.

Depictions of alcoholism and sex contrast with scenes of contented domesticity; questions of faith stand in counterpoint to the harsher realities of pornography and violence. Lovers, friends, family, and strangers play an equal part in shaping these sharply barbed observations, fleshing out the typically unseen and unspoken dramas of both small town and urban existence.

From out of “an anarchy of conventional process” comes Evie Christie’s stunning, original observations — because despite the searing and sometimes controversial themes, this is essentially love poetry — the kind that will leave your “heart plundered, hands lifted, gutted.”