The Reign

The Reign

In this utterly unique modern fairy tale, Shane Neilson steps clairvoyantly into Enniskillen, an expropriated New Brunswick community abandoned just before it became part of a military base. Intellectually disabled and left behind, the story’s protagonist, Willard, fades into the land and into love with Casey — a tyrannical industrialist who is also a magnificent whitetail buck. The Reign is the swirling, ever-shifting story of a land that endures industrialism and a love that refuses subordination. From lyrics to prose, images to echolalia, this unforgettable myth drifts effortlessly through a wide range of forms and registers to deliver a breathtaking, unparalleled tale. Shane Neilson brings lavish language and an empathic imagination to a neglected pocket of New Brunswick history. He mythologizes and invents in ways that don’t abstract from but honour the real lives of the displaced people who have inspired his story-making. Combining political critique, alertness to disability, and a high-lyric sensibility, The Reign is absolutely riveting, one of Neilson’s most powerful poetry books to date. -- Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty I’ve never read anything like Shane Neilson’s The Reign . These feral poems startled me: I was a deer before a hunter. Somewhat narrated by a “nearmute scholar of place” named Willard, a non-binary King Lear, The Reign puns on a kingly reign at odds with the ubiquitous rain and perhaps even the inborn reins that reign in nature. Forests speak. The moon declaims. Deer discourse. The line between human and animal blurs in a Caliban lyrical mash-up that includes fracking, which our poet aligns with Philip Larkin’s favourite four-letter word. Sexuality is grafted onto nature in lines such as this from the forest: “I’m late-season sap/dripping from water-split bark. I’m clogged syntax that mimics the internal/pressure of trees.” Frisky poems leap like stags and does across the pages, sweating in their pelage, shaking in estrus, smelling of scat, rutting. There are two strategies for a poet: go wide or go narrow — Whitman or Dickinson — drag the whole world in or burrow deep into a narrow particularity. Neilson goes through Whitman’s capacious door. His Canadian poetic collage is wholly original. Part T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland , part Claudia Rankine’s Citizen , part W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants — The Reign deploys photography, footnotes, a family tree of antlers, newspaper factoids, stage dialogue, mathematical equations, words running helter-skelter on the page, and emojis to illustrate this maker’s eco-poetical claim that humanity ruins nature. How to stop greed and commerce from blotting out the world God gave us? Shane Neilson is Gerard Manley Hopkins streaking through the woods. As Neilson writes: “All I’ve ever loved was dirty, flawed. Hard. Grown over with moss. Too dangerous to use well or easy. Raw, wild, and right.” Read this fecund book: run, rut, resurrect, riot, rattle, roll, roil, rejoice, reread! -- Spencer Reece, author of Acts The Reign extends and builds on New Brunswick, but the words “extends” and “builds” hardly do justice to a book that is so vitally charged with originality, that is relentless in its inventiveness, unapologetic in its strangeness, and deeply compelling. -- Aaron Schneider ― The Temz Review “A tale of land, love, and language, The Reign defies genres, keeping readers guessing at what will happen next.” -- Jessica Rose ― Hamilton City Magazine