A REVIEW OF SARAH DE LEEUW'S
GEOGRAPHIES OF A LOVER
BY TARYN HUBBARD

The Rusty Toque | Reviews | Issue 5 | November 15, 2013
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Geographies of a Lover
by Sarah de Leeuw
NeWest Press, 2013
Winner of the 2013 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Sarah de Leeuw’s second book, and first poetry collection, fuses the erotic language of a passionate and steamy affair with a married man with a deep, sensual love for the Canadian landscape of the north. Through vivid and frenzied lyric prose poetry that blurs the line between sex and ecology, Geographies of a Lover moves towards a euphoric eco-poetics that maps a love affair through pipelines, cabins, and rustled sheets.

Prefaced with a quote from Elizabeth Smart’s famous By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, de Leeuw’s work is sectioned into the lexicon of mapping: distance, place, topography, scale, contour lines, borderlands, and north. It is during these sections where the more narrative details of the affair surface: the meeting of the nameless lover, a glimpse into the history of his relationship with his wife and children, and the nuances of the narrator’s life and love for this man.

The titles within each section take the form of latitude and longitude coordinates and function not only as a map to trace the moments of an affair, but also help build a tangible travelogue the reader can readily locate via an atlas or a website like Google Maps. For example, “53o55’06.72”N 122o43’39.25”W” is River Road in Prince George, B.C., “44o13’44.48”N 76o28’39.74”W is Waterfront Pathway in Kingston, ON, and “36o47’40.84”N 108o40’53.56”W” is Bluff Road in Shiprock, New Mexico. While the specificity of place in de Leeuw’s work helps situate it firmly within the contested sites of Canada’s north as well as in spaces below the 49th parallel, the fact that these sites are labeled in technical geographical coordinates instead of the place’s common name works to create a code that readers may or may not choose to translate.

Within her latitude and longitude sites, de Leeuw creates a rich, erotic love song told through a stream-of-consciousness poetry that drifts from the intimacies of sex to the particulars of an environment under distress: 
you make effort to undress me slowly, considerately, but there’s something crawling under my skin unquenchable a raven flying too low caught on the wing by a spark feathers burning images of families watching homes disappear sage brush fire starter lichen and moss evaporate in the heat entire mountain sides with bed rock exposed tree trunk nothing but ruined black sticks. (27)
In this poem, and throughout the book, sex and the environment are wound together only to be slowly stretched out and expanded in prose that flattens the experience of bedroom intimacies against the living and breathing natural world.

As the poem develops, the lover is revealed to be a man who both ravages her body with unquenchable urgency and is the only person confident enough to manage the vast Northern environment set for pipeline installation: “No one but you will agree to supervise the pipeline construction, these rough-neck men. So you go. After you leave, I stew rhubarb and contemplate the heights of mountains in Alaska and the piles of displaced earth in Alberta’s tar sands” (25).  Throughout the book, the lover’s unceasing sexual desire for the speaker’s body parallels the constant tapping of resources in the natural environment such as in “44o13’44.48”N 76o28’39.74”W”:
i am laying on my back watching the weather, cum and bits of broken condom seeping out of me, my cunt a squall and all i can dream of is richard brautigan’s springhill mine disaster taking place in my womb, i want the storm to rip right through me leaving nothing in its wake. (41)
The lover is not so much a man but a force, on the speaker and her body, and on the environment. However, while the speaker is enraptured by him, she remains independent and, ultimately, separate from his life outside the confines of sex.

Sarah de Leeuw’s Geographies of a Lover is a collection of prose poems that trace the beginning and ultimate end of a hot and passionate affair with a married man. With unfiltered images of sex organs, bodily fluids, and physical and mental wounds, de Leeuw has put together a collection of work that brilliantly straddles the line between erotica and eco-poetics. The rhythmic pulse of her writing achieves the sensation that the reader will either be swallowed up in the details of an illicit affair or sunk down into the mess of the tar sands, all within the same poem.
TARYN HUBBARD is a writer in Surrey, BC. Her work has appeared in CV2, EVENT, Room, The Golden Handcuffs Review, and others. She keeps a blog at tarynhubbard.com.