Zoe Whittall (N. Maxwell Lander)

When I begin reading Zoe Whittall’s No Credit River, I am on a train. I usually read on the train. 

As I lean in to highlight certain lines – the pages rest on the foldable tray – the marker drifts and sways with the movement of the train. I’m a poet so I enjoy this. I’m a poet so I write a note in the margins about how this experience mimics a quality of the book, its ebbing and fraying, its internal and external rotations.

No Credit River is a book about falling in and out of love; it is a book about becoming pregnant and miscarrying; it is a book about being alone and being with other people; and it is a book about writing, and writing about writing. Merging prose poetry and autofiction, Whittall offers a unique memoir focused on heartbreak, anxiety, and lingering desires. 

I am fascinated by the form: prose poems, lines justified, confined to one page, or recto leading into verso, but never a poem spanning the pages from left to right. I realize this pattern from the blank pages and lack of section breaks, the white holes of the book; they confuse even an experienced reader. Each page is like a coin – heads and tails – and I wonder why the width of two pages felt unacceptable. I contemplate how this confinement feels in line with the emotional confinements the book grapples with – both throughout the time of the pandemic, and earlier, in relation to  the body, anxiety, and desire. An implicit value is whispered through form, each poem’s length circumscribed.

Whittall’s writing is spare and cinematic; the texture loose, memorable, and scattered with lines as poetic as they are biting. Her I’ll tell it like it is attitude is very much at the core of the humour, the poetry, and the sensuality of the book. A quiet trust is placed in the reader that none of this will be taken as innocuous, that even the smallest details are important – a trust returned, in part, because of her generous heaps of self-deprecation and self-awareness piled on alongside the heartache and introspection. “I did all the things I judge other people for,” she writes in “A Shot at the Night,” “including writing about it.”

The essential arc of the book is the story of one relationship, the longing that came before it, and the heartbreak that came after. Interwoven with this story is the desire for a child that precedes any individual relationship, and the shadow of a grief yet to come, imbuing every poem with retrospection. The memoir is nonlinear; the narrator moves back and forth across decades and different relationships, as it pleases each poem. We are in cottage country in Ontario just as soon as we are in Los Angeles screenwriting rooms. 

No Credit River also offers glimpses of a writer’s life and a writer’s community. In “I Don’t Know Where I’m Flying Until I Get to the Airport,” she notes how writers gather and gossip like churchgoers and writes, “At the Moose Jaw airport all the writers pull out their notebooks when the flight is delayed and say, I can’t wait to read your new book, to each other like the peace be with you mumble in church.” There is also community gained from the writing itself, the books and lines that have made their home with Whittall’s own work and move across the pages like friends. In “Securely Attached,” she quotes Tony Hoagland as she thinks about her own work: “my writing is all about anxiety. It’s what poet Tony Hoagland would consider my irresolvable obsession, the one that all writers have.” Countless other lines, from Maggie Nelson to Ariana Reines to Marguerite Duras and beyond, range throughout the collection.

For a book focused on heartbreak, it frequently lingers on love: on the experience of being in love, a hobby and interest, such as reading or watching films, its queerness, so like the narrator’s own. “Of course a poet likes to be in love,” Whittall writes in “Ars Poetica / Poem in the Form of a Note Before Reading.” “Intimacy is the only cliff jump I like. Otherwise I’m in a lifelong battle with catastrophic thinking.” 

Whittall describes the work as “an unreliable memoir” and “an attempt at an alienated truth.” She is reaching for an ineffable image, between the memory of what happened and the truth of it, between the love and the heartbreak, between the question of a family and a relationship, between one person and another. I believe she succeeds, in touching it, in coaxing it briefly, carefully, to bop in and out of sight as it pleases, living in the pages of the poems like dust, allowing whatever thread she’s following to spool and unspool until we end up with her, somewhere close to the “now” of her life.

“But the book isn’t really finished, none of them are,” she writes about a manuscript she edits at a farmhouse retreat in “Prince Edward County,” echoing the final sentiment of the final sentence, of how life goes on. I forgive the book for its muddled, plateaued ending, its strange sense of unfinishedness. I respect it because I think that’s part of its rhythm and its honesty. I take it as an invitation to reread, to jump between the passages I like best, riffling through the pages, knowing that it is a book I will return to, knowing this uneven movement is a way I want to be with this book, with its author, and maybe too, with myself.