Brick Books 50th Anniversary: Brilliant and Timeless Books to Take Another Look At— Short Haul Engine

We’re delighted to continue our 50th anniversary series this month with Karen Solie’s Short Haul Engine. This months blog post is written by David O’Meara.

Short Haul Engine

David O’Meara

Anyone who has been raised in a rural setting understands how distance intensifies the value of mobility. Denied buses and subways in the remote settings of rural Canada, a driver’s licence was and is the essential passport to independence. Karen Solie’s debut poetry collection, Short Haul Engine, is a paeon to isolation and its rugged symbol of resilience, the truck. Solie’s work would become broader in scope, but in Short Haul Engine the template of her voice starts here: hard-nosed self-examination grounded in experience, playfully riffing off touchstones of philosophy, music, history, and science. In Short Haul Engine, amidst epigraphs from Joni Mitchell, Sir Isaac Newton, or an ode to Robert Mitchum, there are references to a promotional pamphlet for “The Only Living Half Boy,” Plato, and Sir Alexander Mackenzie. Throughout, Solie’s brilliance arises from her ability to shift lithely between the hifalutin and the mundane with an organic unparalleled versatility that showcases intelligence in metaphor. Full of dare, it’s a road movie of regret and aspiration. Prairie noir. 

There are numerous modes of transport taken here, whether Volvos, Volkswagens, half-tons, rusty boats, or even a tricycle, but the spirit of the intermediate haunts this book, its narratives equidistant between desire and fulfilment, cognizant of the perils between, seeking protection for the embattled soul. Whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces, desire is deemed “all heat and bad timing” in these poems, sometimes sheltered by small consolations (“Aching, / at least, is quiet.”). It’s as much how as what. She continually catches you off-guard. The light step, then the kick. These wary, unsettled poems are made fresh by the flexible intake and outflow of observation, vivid with lingo, covetous in their musical phrasing: “One bottle unpacked / from a paper sack thuds / a broad heel on cherry veneer.” Elsewhere, of a forest fire, she writes “Hell has gone guerilla in the hills.” This book continues to be infectious through its self-deprecating wisdom and its total devotion to language. Like all of Solie’s work, it does not exhaust itself. I’ve read it dozens of times and never fail to experience delight through its unexpected candidness, humour, and thought.

Karen Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it’s hard to believe this is a first book. Short Haul Engine is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to all sorts of possibilities. Even at their most playful, these poems dive much deeper than initially expected. There’s a remarkably dark sense of humour at work here, but tempered with a haunting vulnerability that makes even the sharpest lines tremble.

About Karen Solie

Karen Solie is the author of three collections of poems, including Pigeon, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her poems have been published in North America, the U.K., and Europe. Her first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine, won the BC Book Prize Dorothy Livesay Award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Gerald Lampert Award, and the ReLit Award. She lives in Toronto.