Spotlight series #90 : Jade Wallace

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

STATEMENT

To do housework is to shake a broom in the face of Death. We chase away the dust that will one day entomb us, we wash away the mould that will eventually eat of our bodies.

The title of this poem, “Mortal Toil,” is a play on a phrase from that famous Shakespearean soliloquy: “in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…” Like Hamlet, the speaker of “Mortal Toil” dreams ambivalently: on the one hand, they see death as a welcome end to the banality of domestic labour; on the other, an inscrutable survival instinct keeps the broom in the speaker’s hand, fending off Death for now.

Our speaker is a tad dramatic, and sees this all as a rather terrible, and certainly as cause for complaint. The poem is thus filled with “ow” sounds (sourly, mounds) and “ow” shapes (windows, Mortal), to underscore the speaker’s feeling of being long-suffering. I adapted this trick from Tender Buttons, after Susan Holbrook pointed out during a lecture that Stein sometimes uses letter shapes that mirror her household subjects.

As a whole, “Mortal Toil” bears out the prophecy foretold by the title of the manuscript the poem comes from: The Work Is Done When We Are Dead, a completed text that, with luck, will be my sophomore poetry collection.

Mortal Toil

Sourly, I sweep
dust mounds from
the corners, soap
the windows to let
my skin know light.

Glowering, I strip down
to scour the bath, send
forth a scalding flow
to wash out cowering
growths of powdery mildew.

Glooming, I shower,
eyes narrowed below
the water, watching for
the shadows that are
surely on their way.

Sine die, I dress in wool or
linen, winnow the bread of
blue flowers of mould that will
one day swallow my body.

Jade Wallace (they/them) is the book reviews editor for CAROUSEL and co-founder of the collaborative writing entity MA|DE. Wallace is the author of a poetry collection Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There (Guernica Editions 2023), and a novel Anomia (Palimpsest Press 2024), while MA|DE has produced ZZOO (Palimpsest Press 2025), as well as several chapbooks, most recently Expression Follows Grim Harmony (JackPine Press 2023).