When the temptation of Geographies of a Lover arrived in my mailbox, I was impatient for the opportunity to pour myself a bath and settle in for a sumptuous read. The first line of the opening poem Distance, however, set the tone of the book: Something terrible may one day happen to you. Her prescience was fulfilled where this book is concerned.

It was with profound disappointment and disbelief that I persevered through Sarah de Leeuw’s series of prose poems about a doomed love affair, convinced that within the pages of this slim book of poems I might be invited into the intrigue of an illicit affair: the mixed feelings of desire and shame, wild abandon and probable abandonment. It is not the subject matter that I found disturbing, rather her failure to invite me into the authenticity of her experience. For Tolstoy, sincerity of the artist in recreating their unique experience is the essence of art. Written from the first person, the author erroneously portrays the protagonist through the morose and wounded retrospection of the jilted lover, biased and inauthentic in its retelling. Only that could account for the incredulity I felt when trying to understand her motives and persistence in this relationship. Even the cover art, which alludes to the sensual familiarity of a fingerprint or tongue’s texture, is elusive in revealing its true identity.

Throughout the poems, details of the two lovers are sparse, along with any apparent sense of an emotional connection between them. The scant and banal expressions of tenderness such as “you sat in front of the window and I touched your damp forehead and kissed your hair” are lost in the plethora of relentless images to the contrary. Mood is conveyed through the geographies they experience together: landscapes rugged and harsh, raw wilderness and undomesticated animals. There is nothing bucolic about the geography, and the eroticism is as dispassionate as sex without foreplay. With prose that reads “in northern british columbia [sic] a landscape as raw red and dying as the lands of my reddened cunt” and “cracked frost-like dried cum on the line of my jaw bone you fucked my mouth like the lake in winter,” the juxtaposition of raw carnality with the inhospitality of nature crash together with the sting of a dominatrix’ whip. This is a homeless lust, furtive sexual acts on trains and planes, in tents and motels frequented by Canada’s rural and wanton workforce.

The geographical theme is evoked in the titles of poems which are the coordinates of longitude and latitude, numbers punctuated by degrees, minutes, seconds, as though recording the sparse moments they share together in the wilderness of the illicit. Although clever in concept, the numbers feel elusive as a secret message whose code has been lost. Groupings of poems are assigned under headings with geomatic terms such as topography, contour lines and north. Colder than the Arctic Circle, and devoid of curvaceous contours, the emotion in this collection of poems is as bleak and barren as the landscapes it describes. Reconciling cunnilingus in the same sentence as grizzlies rummaging in garbage dumps calls for rather creative mind-mapping from the reader, or an uncommon sense for the erotic.

Ms. de Leeuw’s persistent and exclusive use of the word cunt to speak of her primary sexual organ is perplexing. Cunt has the greatest shock value of all words in the English language. Used as a pejorative, it is flagellation with self-condemnation in the context of this fool-hardy venture. As a woman, I feel offended and alienated by her perpetuation of the misogynist connotations, such that empathy and pathos are repelled.

If Ms de Leeuw’s intention is to invite the reader into her raw, tormented feelings of abandonment and unexpressed grief over her lover’s entrenched silence, then she has succeeded at her craft. But if her attempt was to emulate Elizabeth Smart’s courageous perception-influenced-by-perspective prose poetry in “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept”, then she has removed herself too far from the experience to be convincing. Personally, in future I will not be beguiled so easily by a seductive-sounding book title.