Book Review
Title: Autopsy of a Turvy World
Author: Sheri-D Wilson
Publisher: Frontenac House
Released: 2008
Pages: 92
ISBN-13: 978-1-897181-17-1
$15.95 CDN  

Reviewed By: Taryn Hubbard (Vancouver Correspondent - Canada) 

Sheri-D Wilson, Calgary's poet, performer, and very own Mama of Dada, has a collection of poetry on her hands that looks inside this modern world of ours and pulls out an array of people, places, and themes for a thorough examination. In Autopsy of a Turvy World, Wilson leads her reader through lonely single-room apartments, traps them in big plastic bubbles, and sings to them under dark bridges with the spontaneity and excitement of a joyride in a turquoise '57 Chevy.                     

Wilson, founder of the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, knows how to write a poem that jumps off the page at you. Her style is fluid and episodic. Wilson tells a story in each of her poems and her characters are as well developed as any character in a novel. For instance, in the book's title poem, "Autopsy of a Turvy World," Black Diamond, a prostitute, is described as the "Styrofoam cup/that got tossed too many times/on the landfill." Wilson's interest in people, life, and human nature is revealed through her conscious yet natural choice of language.

One aspect I always enjoy about Wilson's work is the impression that she is actually having fun writing her poems. In "A Slippery Slope: Anti-Aging & the Skiing Peeing Story, all in one," the speaker explains to a "young whippersnapper" what it was like for "nasty-ass good-old bad-girls" to go skiing without an iPod. Gasp! I know the poem was truly a lesson in history.

Sheri-D Wilson's Autopsy of a Turvy World is a part of Frontenac House's Quartet 2008. Other titles include Sharron Proulx-Turner's she is reading her blanket with her hands, Karen Hofmann's Water Strider, and Richard Stevenson's Wiser Pills.