Cristalle Smith's ​Invisible Lives

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(University of Calgary Press, 2024)

​Invisible Lives opens with three lines on the domestic violence experienced by the speaker in 2012. It moves between the late seventies and eighties, through childhood and teen years to adulthood. Smith paints a vivid picture with grotesque details, dreams, flashbacks and nested stories. Poems are tight, with an accumulation of striking images that convey wonder, grief, and a child’s attempts at joy while dealing with childhood molestation violence, poverty and squalor.
 
In “Lyric Lab Report,” an essay at the end of the book which serves as an untitled afterword, Smith explains what she is trying to do and has succeeded in accomplishing so effectively in Invisible Lives:

​I want to defamiliarize my familiar memories. I want to create strangeness in landscapes of my childhood […] Poetry is a maze with no ending. A problem with no solution. A space of clashes and uncertainty […] I struggle with form. How should I divide these vignettes? […] Tell the whole terrible truth.

​One way in which memories are defamiliarized is in the structure of the book.  The book contains no table of contents. Poems tend to bleed into one another. An untitled prose sequence follows a titled stanza-based poem, but continues the subject of the prose sequence so that I cannot always tell whether it is separate or part of the earlier prose. The lack of clear borders between poetry and prose sequences helps to demonstrate the feeling of “a maze without an ending.”
 
The book switches between childhood and adulthood, Florida and Alberta, poetry, prose and text messages.  This disorienting form doesn’t feel accidental but deliberate as a way to render the upheaval and terror of violence. Smith does not offer a linear unfolding of events but leaps from the speaker’s memories of being fondled by a friend in a pool as a teen,

​When you’re a girl, you take things into you.
Like breathing chlorine through nostrils,
drowning in recreational wave pools
in February. Like fingers sliding in and out.
Tummy dropping to toes and bluegreen
swimsuits on ankles. “Ladybug, Ladybug”

​back to being scalded by hot water at five years old while watching Care Bears: 

Liquid poured on my thighs, soaking through neon green bicycle
shorts. I didn’t cry as it leaked into white socks, ruffles filled with noodles.

​These leaps help to create “a space of clashes” as each memory clashes with the next in a cacophony of horrors.
 
Through specific references to popular culture and other details that refer to time, such as the 1989 van of the speaker’s stepfather, Smith gives readers a framework and grounds the work in time. There are eighties and nineties references, such as the films Jurassic Park and The Matrix, and the Mac computer game Where in the World is Carmen Santiago?
 
Another example of a break from conventional structure is the inclusion of text messages four times within the book. The main conversation is between teens Flakjacketblitz and SubmissiveAttack. We are given no clear indication of who these people are, but later there is a reference to text messages in the poem “Wail II”:

​Strange
 
boy, I’d take your text messages.
iPhone to Android, I love you.
Play them on loop over names
you called me.

​At one point, SA refers to a photo of a mother otter holding her baby awkwardly and telling FA that this photo made her think of him. The reference to an awkward relationship between mother and child seems relevant to the speaker’s role as a single mother and to her own relationship with her mother, which is complex, as described in various vignettes throughout the book. They alternate between examples of tenderness, such as putting a wind-up clock inside an old teddy bear to make the sound of a heartbeat, and harshness, such as when the speaker is in labour in “W. Terminus” and her mother tells her to stop moaning because her husband needs sleep.
 
Throughout the book, there is an overriding feeling of sadness. Even objects are infused with it. “Open cardboard sagged in sad rectangles.” Smith refers to “the banality of sadness” and “forgotten sadness” in the prose sequence “Fragments of Ficus”. In “Cattails Under the GoodYear Blimp,” she writes, “I am often sad. Always alone.”
 
I am overwhelmed by the power and honesty of the speaker in the face of such tragedy and trauma. In “A Woman Dreams” Smith writes:

​I dream the murder of my body,
there is pain and pressure and
air pushing from lungs
a feeling of
the husband who said he loved me
repeats,
My hands, my hands. While he sobs little boy tears
onto his
cheeks and into his beard.
He apparently left his sadness
until now, thinking
I would have been dead on the mattress instead.

​In Invisible Lives, Smith has brought visibility to the subject of abuse, and has succeeded in telling “the whole terrible truth” of intimate partner violence, mental health issues, poverty, generational trauma and abuse.

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Photo credit: Charles Earl

​Amanda Earl (she/her) writes, edits, reviews and publishes on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. She is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a long-poem collection provoked by her near-death health crisis. Amanda offers an editing and mentorship service. Visit TinyUrl.com/AmandaEarlEdits for more information and subscribe to her Substack: Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for whimsy, exploration and a feeling of connection with kindred misfits.