Annick MacAskill’s Votive, the anticipated follow-up to her 2022 Governor General’s Award–winning collection Shadow Blight, combines themes of intimacy, privacy, eros, and queerness, while the transgressive and the religious infuse this collection. Of course, votive candles, in the religious sense, are lit to make a vow, a request, or a prayer – a ritual binding of the sacred and the profane. In that space, MacAskill interrogates wisdom, paradox, and faith itself. 

At times, what presents as blatantly literal reveals itself as a soft inquiry. MacAskill’s explorations are feminine, shy yet strong. In the opening poem, “Journal intime,” she begins with a subtle inquisition of privacy and intimacy; we, as children, are trained that the “good ones” allow intrusion. MacAskill becomes transgressive in thought and mind, as so many women do, by “quick adapting / to the assignment, unspoken: to entertain without / worrying, exaggerating this and muffling that.” Judgmental, intruding, and foreign eyes are treated to a trompe l’oeil, a stage show, to meet assignments, approvals, and yet, subvert the truth through avoidance. There’s a slyness to this narrator, a meta-personality, who reveals and conceals simultaneously. Wisdom is questioned and personified, while weaving specific details and generalized insights: “we only exist in context.”

A signature of MacAskill’s work is formal experimentation. Votive is peppered with glosa forms and sonnet forms. She weaves together observational imagery with inquisition. The juxtaposition of the holy with social media is one particular example within the poem “I felt a first communion in my brain.” An almost surreal back-and-forthing of the sacred and profane creates a dichotomy of reactions, very much in tune with a generation’s clash with faith’s tradition. How does one seriously imbibe the body of Christ in a YouTube world? Traditions become cinematic and laughable, yet somehow, in MacAskill’s hands these rituals remain necessary and essential. If everything exists in context, as claimed, then the rituals on trial are framed by the twin pillars of devotional vow and wisdom. The subtlety of the subtext in Votive is indeed like smoke: you can wander through it effortlessly, but the scent of it remains in your clothes. Faith is “understated ceremony.”

The light, heat, and “molten sea” of wax are presented as symbolic of Christ’s light. The narrator, taken over by the act of faith, sees the light in the world, trusts, and somehow retains faith, despite authentic Sapphic sexuality. The heart loves what the heart loves – and the narrator struggles with the paradox of being a misfit devotee. Real wisdom resides in the authentic confession of queerness and listening to the softest knowing. 

MacAskill also calls mythos to the fore of female experience with accolades to Penelope, her weaving and unpicking to buy time – a tribute to the woman who would not surrender to the wrong lover – and to Io, turned into a heifer to avoid the wrath of scorned Hera. As MacAskill writes: “All lessons in the femininity / I couldn’t care to imitate.”