Mark Anthony Jarman's ​Burn Man

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Biblioasis, 2023)

The first story I read by Mark Anthony Jarman was about Margaret Atwood on an airplane—“Love Is All Around Us”—in his 1997 collection 19 Knives, and I couldn’t tell you what I expected: maybe some fiddling with a packet of peanuts? or a perfunctory correction of a sleeping neighbour’s lean? But I didn’t expect she would be the flight attendant, that she would climb up the side of the CN Tower and, later, kiss k.d. lang.*

The next I read was in Front&Centre#9 (2004): “Your Very Own Personal All-Canadian Marxist Hockey League.” By then, I expected something unexpected. There’s a Barcalounger and some discussion of class consciousness, a Rheostatics CD and a prohibition against sniffing Drano. “Pesos, rubles, or Canadian Tire money, whatever—people will pay to see these match-ups. You can tell your grandchildren you were there at the start.”

The stories in Burn Man reach back to the start of Jarman’s career: twenty-one of them, selected across four decades, opening with an essay by John Metcalf. With references ranging from Wordsworth to Denis Johnston, Seamus Heaney to Tom McGuane, Metcalf discusses Jarman’s influences and situates his work in a broader cultural context. He quotes the Salon des Refusées issue of Canadian Notes & Queries and Donald Glover’s “How to Read a Mark Jarman Story,” along with some of Jarman’s poetry (he’s also published a novel and two volumes of travel-writing).

Metcalf focuses on “Cowboys Incorporated,” published in Jarman’s 1984 debut Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and highlights the author’s reflections on writing it at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: “The story wasn’t easy to digest, was not A to B,” Jarman observes, “and not tied up with a pretty bow, but I realised I liked it that way.”

Perhaps these stories are wrapped in newspaper rather than giftwrap, with a smear of BBQ sauce where a bow might have been. But their inner workings are orchestrated and tuned. And perhaps the soundtrack is more post-punk than classical. But it’s also poetic.

Frequently, the stories are populated by characters who inhabit chaotic and propulsive scenes, but Jarman’s narratives are so tightly controlled that, as they unfurl, readers plummet alongside without realising they’re falling.

In “Cowboys,” a [bra] “strap keeps falling from her ivory shoulder. He replaces it but it keeps falling and falling from her ivory shoulder.” That fall echoes throughout the collection, in the form of rhythmic elements (like a phrase that repeats like a refrain in “Assiniboia Death Trip,” or Cat Power’s cover of “Moonshiner” on repeat in “The Hospital Island,” or the “hectic arms, sleepy syllables, and sybarite synapses” in “19 Knives”) and in other falls (like a knife falling to the floor or a baby, or the metaphorical fall of a legend in the Custer-era wartime tales).

Some of Jarman’s characters are readers, whether they’re leafing through an issue of Western Horseman, sitting in the front seat of a car with Thin Thighs in 30 Days, or have a copy of Thomas Hardy’s Complete Poems on their nightstand. (Lyrics blister these stories, but so naturally that calling them allusions feels over-dressed.)

Most of the characters listen to music, whether The Jesus and Mary Chain or a Spanish version of Blondie’s “Call Me”; one talks back to Lawrence Welk’s “Life is a Holiday on Primrose Lane,” and another sings Johnny Western’s “Ballad of Paladin.”

That themes and motifs reverberate in meticulously constructed stories could suggest an element of distance, a focus more on art than on the world that inspires it. But Jarman’s descriptions are tactile and so detail-oriented that readers remain rooted in the everyday. Yes, there’s ash flicked by a cigarette in one story and ash flying up in the air in the neighbouring story, but there’s also chiffon and tulle, and the aunt in “Burn Man” saves a piece of her nephew’s peeled-off skin from when he was a kid with a sunburn. Readers peer tentatively through these barely-there layers, through fragility to something like hope.

While some people throw themselves from bridges, others plot to cushion their fall, as in “Bear on a Chain.” “The newspaper calls for lifeboats, lifebuoys, lifelines. A phonebooth is installed at the bridge’s south end.” A character in “Bluebird Driver” says, “I know where you’re from.” Others value connection, too: “I am wrapped, I am wrapped up in her, lost in the word almost.” And it all ends with a character speaking about how far he’s travelled, when his favourite place is “the tiny world we create when two people are kind to each other.”

In Jarman’s tiny worlds, you can count the Canadian Tire money, the battlefields and the knives, the suicides and the cigarettes. But the flight attendant will reveal the emergency exits and there’s an inflatable slide for everyone, stuck under your seat with some chewed-up gum.

* It was also published digitally in Qwertē a couple years later.

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​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.