Xanax Cowboy Poems: A Review By Robin Harvey
Xanax Cowboy is a long-form poem about two of modern life’s overwhelming anxieties: the pain of addiction and the trauma of mental illness.
Governor General’s Literary Award winner Hannah Green’s edgy, gritty title is apt, evoking the title of the unflinching 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy. Her content lives up to that film’s relentless and chaotic themes. Much of the Xanax Cowboy is presented as variations of the screenplay format. The work reflects many distinct character voices; the aimless junkie, the social poseur, the sad women confused by sexual roles and mores and her comforting mother.
The voice of the cowboy XC is paramount and the touchstone for the many Western images and tropes throughout like lassoes, nooses, pickled eggs and dung. Atop each page where a new entry begins a symbol of a horseshoe hangs. Green writes of the Xanax Cowboy whose cactuses can whisper and “live a long time without water but not blood.”
She employs an array of literary and experimental styles and forms, referencing icons like Patsy Cline, Leonardo DiCaprio and Willie Nelson, among others. One of strongest literary references is to Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems. The author quotes from the book directly: “In Boot Hill there are only two graves that belong to women / and they are the only known suicides in that graveyard.”
Like Ondaatje, Green embraces poetic prose while bending form and content— yet is still essentially literary. The core voices: the addict, the Xanax cowboy, the sad woman and her mother speak in heartfelt reflection presenting biting social commentary through their musings.
We hear the passion of the fervent social justice warrior, the sneer of the jaded cynical junkie and the tenderness of a devoted mother.. Though dark, the confessional poems are never bleak. “Trauma lives in the body like a cowboy lives in the television,” an addict voice relays. “I am a grease trap that requires hourly cleaning.”
Another “howls on the side of the highway like a coyote in heat . . . shivering like a room without a thermostat.” In keeping with the play on a screenplay, many pages are presented as or with director’s notes. Some combine commentary with concrete poetry as in DIRECTOR’S NOTE, a ten-line poem with a right margin that creates the curve of a woman's breast.
“Tarantino film. . . women are vicious in vinyl booths . . . with jawlines so jagged we forget they don’t have autonomy_” its longest line reads to form the peak of the curve.Much concrete poetry is presented in the outline of a square, anchored to the page by punchy bottom note lines, as in XC on Instagram 3. “Who needs friends when you can have whiskey,” its anchor line sneers.
Green employs her biting humour to draw the reader through the heavier subject matter as in The Xanax Cowboy Installs a Meditation App, which pokes fun at society’s wandering attention span. She shows her wit in another entry that starts with the weighty phrase, “I am told that we live without choices " then hits the reader with unexpected levity of, “Mine is a terrible roommate,”
The page entry about a childhood vacation at a rustic cabin, “a nest of goose eggs in the reeds crowing the lake,” again punches with the unexpected when a grandfather comes outside to chastise his grandkids with, “what the fuck are you doing?”
Two eight-line stanzas where all the lines begin with Re: make up an intriguing conversation in An Email Exchange between a Thesis Advisor and a Xanax Cowboy. “Google attention-seeking behaviour in women,” an italicized lament about how too often women share too much information on social media keeps the cyber world theme alive.
Green’s complex, colloquial whimsy is grounded in a strong academic backbone and a broad knowledge base that references Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath. And how she loves wordplay and puns, like “reelist” and film “reals.” Her mix of stream-of-consciousness prose, conversational poems, snippets of emails, multiple hashtags and slang can be a bit confounding but is not gimmicky.
The surprise and whimsy contrast with the darker subject matter in this edgy, bold book. It’s well worth the romp through her at times confusing pages to buck the complexities of this dazzling ride.
Xanax Cowboy by Hannah Greene, House of Anansi, ten pages, $19.19.