Wading the Trout River, review by Susan Drodge, Canadian Literature

     Zonailo's Wading the Trout River speaks to the power of influence and attests to the influence of Judeo-Christian discourse on our grapplings with the ineffable. This collection likewise moves through four different sections: "Geographies of the Heart," which offers a number of memorable portraits of human compassion and vanity; "The Male Nudes," which resurrects "the divine masculine" from "the reckonings of our gendered selves"; "Twin Souls," which plays with notions of self, shadow, and romantic love; and "Letters of the Alphabet," which infuses each letter with romantic expectation and desire.

     Zonailo is direct in her diction and compassionate in her characterizations. In "Old Ladies of Montreal," she depicts women who "have earned their chin / whiskers or mouths where / lipstick runs over the edges," while in "Alex the Doorman," she mythologizes a socially marginal character who has assumed the position of "a liminal god, / addressing all who enter or exit."

     Wading the Trout River, however, is obscure at times in its communication of experience, as its intimate addresses to a specific romantic partner assume an understanding between subject and other that limits the imagery of some of these poems. This readerly desire for more detail, on the other hand, could signify Zonailo's ultimate success in eliciting a voyeuristic impulse to synthesize self and other—an impulse that seems to be the motivating force of many of her poems.

Copyright by Susan Drodge: www.carolynzonailo.com, 2004.