Blackwash Canal by Jason Labbe (A Review by Jana Wilson)

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H_ngm_n Books

33 pgs

At first glance Jason Labbe’s new chapbook Blackwash Canalis a faulty play with form. In the first section entitled “Six Poems for X” Labbe’s exemplary language is lost in the over-reliance of form that it becomes almost tedious with its loose images and abstract substance. While “Six Poems for X” was a weak beginning, Labbe takes control embracing long lines in the section entitled “Bethany Dusk Radio” and easily redeems a chapbook that got off to a rocky start.

In “Bethany Dusk Radio”, Labbe immediately takes control in the first stanza:

“Static in the signal, cobalt dusk breaks up in branches

but only one of us believes it. It’s difficult

not to feel curious about the temperature

of a higher elevation. Or an estranged city at sea level.”

The change of tone is obvious, but it still intriguing with a touch of passion. He incorporates from different forms of artistic substances, varying from Walt Whitman to small moments of recognizable humanity, including my favorite stanza in the chapbook:

“I remember dinners on your fire escape.

I remember a pot of rice falling on the floor.

I remember us riding the subway with a video camera.

I remember us trying to predict the future.”

These small moments of memory that compose each poem are what makes the collection so enveloping.

As Blackwash Canal progresses, the transformation of the poems becomes obvious and reveals a hidden method behind the difference between the three sections, leaning slowly from the short, fragmented lines in “Six Poems for X” to the long, Whitman reminiscent lines of “Six Poems for Jackie”. This epiphany concludes with a brief, “I get it now,” from the reader, and makes Labbe an intriguing author that needs to be stuck with until the very end.

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Jana Wilson currently lives in Greenwood, South Carolina, studying English at Lander University. Wilson is the former assistant fiction editor of Crashtest Literary Magazine and her work can be seen in “OVS Magazine” and “Arcadia”.