Patrick Grace's ​Deviant

Reviewed by Jordan Williamson

(University of Alberta Press, 2024)

A Sunday morning read of Patrick Grace’s debut poetry collection, Deviant, is not your run-of-the-mill, pairs well with a cup of oolong and parfait-type offering. There are no tepid half-measures here. We are having steak and eggs cooked on a greasy flattop, people. The line cook eyeing you from the walk-in considers asking, “What are you doing later?” Here we have a debut that enters the Canadian literary arena with urgency, with gnashing teeth and music, beautiful music.

Here we have the arrival of Vancouver’s very own, and one of Canada’s most promising talents. Deviant, released in the spring of 2024 by University of Alberta Press and edited by Annick McAskill, is a collection that tells us, in no uncertain terms, what side of town it grew up on.

Deviant is a poetic treatise on “The oddities of men,” the anxiety of identity, the tension of “Terror’s first pinch of the hamstrings,” domestic turmoil, new loves, summer camp, pink shorts, Power Rangers, Kitsilano Beach, Slocan Park, a mysterious hole in the porch, a society garroted by the threat of violence, fresh roadkill and soccer practice.

Grace negotiates lyric, image, sensation, and confession as cohesively as he unravels the esoteric riddle of queerness and male identity. In Deviant, the poet and person align in a way you might expect from an artist much further along in years.
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Deviant devastates, cutting in all directions, through every layer of fiber. Each syllable “A wolf in the throat,” a world of “Ghosts of plumb and red mulberry,” “Sleepwalking in dunes at dusk,” “Crotches thrust at the sky.” Grace’s poems have a penchant for pitch and intensity, scale, tension, and movement:

Years ago, the dark gap I imagined
wide enough to have forgotten
how it started in my childhood
 
the oddities of men
in Eaton’s catalogues, cutouts
of jeans and boots and tube socks
Christmas wish lists
full-colour inserts— 
 
this one like my gym teacher,
this one like my bus driver…
 
(from “The Dark Gap”)

Grace deftly navigates the personal and poetic without ambivalence. He knows where he has been and where his art is taking him. At times manic, dizzying, balanced on a rail strut with the menace of freight cars mounting, he counterpoints the emotional intensity of his lyrical efforts by planting his reader’s feet firmly in the fertile B.C soil, flexing and straining with the facility of a vine coming to maturity in one of his beloved Okanagan Valley’s many vineyards.

There are references throughout the collection to Vancouver and its environs, as well as locations near and dear to the poet: Renfrew Community Centre Park, Point Roberts, Washington, the family Volvo. The solidity of place and the relative safety of the real and remembered serve as a welcome grounding for both reader and artist, a safe harbor from which to emotionally recharge before setting out again on treacherous, unpredictable waters.
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Grace has found in those waters a fuller, sharper portrait of the man, artist, survivor. Deviant lavishes itself upon you with an urgency bordering on desperation (the good kind) and, having sufficiently tasted “In a sweet luminous blur” what needed to be tasted, comes home to dance with you in the living room, unconcerned that the neighbours are watching—truth be told, it prefers it that way.

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​Jordan Williamson is a writer and poet from London, Ontario. His work has appeared in Ballast, Tilted House, The /tƐmz/ Review and Funicular Magazine. He was a contributor to Stones Beneath the Surface: A Poetry Anthology from Black Mallard Poetry and Volume Two, Selected from Pinhole. His debut chapbook Love’s Little Dojo is forthcoming from the Pinhole Chapbook Series, spring 2025.