Jenna Lyn Albert
Biography
Jenna Lyn Albert - Photo Courtesy of the Author
Jenna Lyn Albert is an Acadian poet from Saint John, New Brunswick. Albert completed her Master’s in Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where she served as poet laureate from 2019-2020. As part of this position, Albert created and hosted the elm & ampersand podcast with Rebecca Salaz̀ar. Her first poetry collection, Bec & Call, launched in Fall 2018, and won the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize.
They found that boa constrictor near my apartment,
red-tailed, limp on someone’s front lawn, dangerous
in an innocent way: a drawered kitchen knife.
She could have coiled around a pet, someone’s cat,
hypothermic embrace restricting blood, but September’s
end is more predatory than she turned out to be.
I take the long way home, meandering Fredericton’s
streets to avoid the construction’s suffocating dust,
its pylon presence on Connaught. The detour’s familiar
now, like the dead squirrel matted to the pavement
by browning blood in front of the elementary school,
forgotten like a hat, a lost mitten, a pack of flyers.
There’s no brick housing or seed-bare lawns on Albert,
no three-wheeled wagons or deflated teddies
discarded in puddles. I can still hear the air brakes
of the buses shuttling school children to and from,
their wheels throwing back chalkboard debris:
crushed acorns and leaves as thin as loose-leaf.
The street sign’s a plaque nailed to my family’s door,
white letters on blue, unlike the emerald road markers
in Saint John. Albert: the t silent as the street
mid-afternoon, the r lingering on the lips like salt cod
or oyster liquor, but names become unrecognizable
in the capital, where eyes roll like rs at ’cadiens.
A stray skittering through backyards, I cut into the woods,
snaking between maples, over crushed dropseed
and teething thistle, heading toward eggshell siding:
a solitary one-bedroom. I imagine viridescent scales
at my ankles, the reptile-cool embrace of another
wanderer tasting its surroundings, uncaged, unnamed.
Published in Bec & Call. Nightwood Editions, 2018.
Republished here with the author’s permission.
red-tailed, limp on someone’s front lawn, dangerous
in an innocent way: a drawered kitchen knife.
She could have coiled around a pet, someone’s cat,
hypothermic embrace restricting blood, but September’s
end is more predatory than she turned out to be.
I take the long way home, meandering Fredericton’s
streets to avoid the construction’s suffocating dust,
its pylon presence on Connaught. The detour’s familiar
now, like the dead squirrel matted to the pavement
by browning blood in front of the elementary school,
forgotten like a hat, a lost mitten, a pack of flyers.
There’s no brick housing or seed-bare lawns on Albert,
no three-wheeled wagons or deflated teddies
discarded in puddles. I can still hear the air brakes
of the buses shuttling school children to and from,
their wheels throwing back chalkboard debris:
crushed acorns and leaves as thin as loose-leaf.
The street sign’s a plaque nailed to my family’s door,
white letters on blue, unlike the emerald road markers
in Saint John. Albert: the t silent as the street
mid-afternoon, the r lingering on the lips like salt cod
or oyster liquor, but names become unrecognizable
in the capital, where eyes roll like rs at ’cadiens.
A stray skittering through backyards, I cut into the woods,
snaking between maples, over crushed dropseed
and teething thistle, heading toward eggshell siding:
a solitary one-bedroom. I imagine viridescent scales
at my ankles, the reptile-cool embrace of another
wanderer tasting its surroundings, uncaged, unnamed.
Published in Bec & Call. Nightwood Editions, 2018.
Republished here with the author’s permission.
Critical Analysis: Hard T Imposed: Anglophone Normalization in Jenna Lyn Albert's "Unnamed"
Jamie Kitts (ACPA Managing Editor 2019)
In August 2015, a boa constrictor named Venus escaped from her owner’s home on Beckwith Street in Fredericton, New Brunswick. This story made local news, then it went regional, and then national publications like MacLean’s ran stories about the snake loose in Fredericton. This sensational response was fueled by stories recalling an escaped python which killed two young boys from Campbellton, NB in 2013. Venus was no danger to people, and was found on nearby Albert Street that September. Venus’s story provides the backbone for Jenna Lyn Albert’s poem “Unnamed.”
The real-life version of Albert Street is something like the poet’s description. The section that connects to Connaught Street maintains full lawns. Little refuse clutters the yards of varied-yet-gorgeous homes. It is a neighborhood for nuclear families. There used to be a middle school on the section between York and Regent, where there is now a YMCA which still receives busloads of children. But the street can be deathly quiet at times.
Albert’s rendering of the dead squirrel on Connaught draws out the function of her unrhymed tercet form: to break an image into three parts and highlight conflict. The squirrel is “familiar… forgotten” (84), and by implication ignored if it is fixed near Connaught Street Elementary School. This is a common occurrence in many places, but here it signifies a cold indifference: a discriminating power structure which this neighborhood abides. The squirrel and the dust kicked up by construction workers function as metaphors for the francophone experience in a predominantly English-speaking city like Fredericton – or more broadly, the promise of a bilingual province (to say nothing of its immigrant and indigenous populations) broken by an uncompromising anglophone system and people.
Albert’s Acadian background features prominently in her collection Bec & Call, but her poem “Identity Crisis at Dixie Lee: Shippagan, NB” pairs with “Unnamed.” Though her family is Acadian, Albert learned Standard French as an immersion student, not one of New Brunswick’s regional dialects. Standard French is very distinct from the Acadian French and Chiac dialects spoken in New Brunswick. “Identity Crisis” demonstrates the cultural clash between French dialects and the mental gymnastics required to effectively switch between two, as delivered through idioms and greasy local food (30). As such the provincial enforcement of Standard French in immersion programs can be read as a xenophobic action which alienates francophone communities from their cultures in favor of a globalized French. French immersion can also be read as a classist act which enforces boundaries between English and French language communities within New Brunswick – something like the difference between urban and rural communities. This is the anglophone stigmatization of French languages alluded to in “Unnamed”: “names become unrecognizable / in the capital, where eyes roll like rs at ’cadiens” (85).
Albert identifies with the snake. She uses Venus’s anti-climactic story to unpack her Acadian roots as negotiated within a highly Anglicized environment and by drawing parallels with herself and the snake. Albert’s hometown of Saint John uses “emerald road markers” instead of Fredericton’s white-on-blue street signs. In the final stanza, Albert pictures a “viridescent” (green) reptile companion, specifically “another / wanderer” (85).
Albert’s Bec & Call collection manages many contexts, but “Unnamed” especially figures into them. Owing to the tradition of contemporary Acadian poetry, Acadie is not a fixed place. It essentially is no place, “a place with no geographical beginning or end” (Chiasson 85), but it persists as a named culture. For Albert, it is located in memory throughout Bec & Call, and as a state of being – a people. In “Unnamed” this is rendered as her memories of Saint John’s road markers, but also as her self-ascribed wanderer status, and the pejorative leering she feels from Fredericton. “Unnamed” feels very much like a response to Herménégilde Chiasson’s poem “So You Won’t Fly Away,” a plea for fixed identity and a stable life in a “paradise” that nurtures rather than confines (Chiasson 19). Chiasson’s poem features anglophone boundaries which choke and limit francophones who flee their communities in search of home. Both poems feature a person identified as a green animal in flight.
“Unnamed” also complicates femme fatale tropes. The penultimate stanza is a shortcut through a wooded area. By anthropomorphizing her movement, “A stray skittering through backyards… / snaking between maples” (Albert 85), Albert invokes the image of the woman in the woods. But she does so in a way which disarms and recontextualizes such a reading. If she is the woman in the woods, then whose woods she occupies matters: they are the woods of the same place which objectifies her and the snake, which snidely rolls eyes at Acadians, and which confuses a boa for a python. This squares “Unnamed” among broader themes of Bec & Call, particularly in its frank depictions of female sexuality. In this way it reads as a decidedly feminist take on the Acadian “re-affirmation of the self” in Raymond Guy Leblanc’s work (Boudreau xix).
Ultimately what makes Venus and Albert both wanderers is their transplant from a comfortable environment to one in which they are othered, stripped of their identities. Fredericton echos a more welcoming home, one where the facts of their existences are not demonized by a community which derides them with assigned stereotypes – a community as choking in its construction as Fredericton’s frequent road repairs.
Works Cited (for analysis):
Albert, Jenna Lyn. Bec & Call. Nightwood Editions, 2018, pp. 30-85.
Boudreau, Raoul. “Poetry as Action,” Unfinished Dreams: Contemporary Poetry of Acadie. Edited by Fred Cogswell and Jo-Anne Elder, Goose Lane Editions, 1990, pp. xvii-xxvii.
Chiasson, Herménégilde. To Live and Die in Scoudouc. 1979. Translated by Jo-Anne Elder, Icehouse Poetry, 2018, pp. 19-85.
In August 2015, a boa constrictor named Venus escaped from her owner’s home on Beckwith Street in Fredericton, New Brunswick. This story made local news, then it went regional, and then national publications like MacLean’s ran stories about the snake loose in Fredericton. This sensational response was fueled by stories recalling an escaped python which killed two young boys from Campbellton, NB in 2013. Venus was no danger to people, and was found on nearby Albert Street that September. Venus’s story provides the backbone for Jenna Lyn Albert’s poem “Unnamed.”
The real-life version of Albert Street is something like the poet’s description. The section that connects to Connaught Street maintains full lawns. Little refuse clutters the yards of varied-yet-gorgeous homes. It is a neighborhood for nuclear families. There used to be a middle school on the section between York and Regent, where there is now a YMCA which still receives busloads of children. But the street can be deathly quiet at times.
Albert’s rendering of the dead squirrel on Connaught draws out the function of her unrhymed tercet form: to break an image into three parts and highlight conflict. The squirrel is “familiar… forgotten” (84), and by implication ignored if it is fixed near Connaught Street Elementary School. This is a common occurrence in many places, but here it signifies a cold indifference: a discriminating power structure which this neighborhood abides. The squirrel and the dust kicked up by construction workers function as metaphors for the francophone experience in a predominantly English-speaking city like Fredericton – or more broadly, the promise of a bilingual province (to say nothing of its immigrant and indigenous populations) broken by an uncompromising anglophone system and people.
Albert’s Acadian background features prominently in her collection Bec & Call, but her poem “Identity Crisis at Dixie Lee: Shippagan, NB” pairs with “Unnamed.” Though her family is Acadian, Albert learned Standard French as an immersion student, not one of New Brunswick’s regional dialects. Standard French is very distinct from the Acadian French and Chiac dialects spoken in New Brunswick. “Identity Crisis” demonstrates the cultural clash between French dialects and the mental gymnastics required to effectively switch between two, as delivered through idioms and greasy local food (30). As such the provincial enforcement of Standard French in immersion programs can be read as a xenophobic action which alienates francophone communities from their cultures in favor of a globalized French. French immersion can also be read as a classist act which enforces boundaries between English and French language communities within New Brunswick – something like the difference between urban and rural communities. This is the anglophone stigmatization of French languages alluded to in “Unnamed”: “names become unrecognizable / in the capital, where eyes roll like rs at ’cadiens” (85).
Albert identifies with the snake. She uses Venus’s anti-climactic story to unpack her Acadian roots as negotiated within a highly Anglicized environment and by drawing parallels with herself and the snake. Albert’s hometown of Saint John uses “emerald road markers” instead of Fredericton’s white-on-blue street signs. In the final stanza, Albert pictures a “viridescent” (green) reptile companion, specifically “another / wanderer” (85).
Albert’s Bec & Call collection manages many contexts, but “Unnamed” especially figures into them. Owing to the tradition of contemporary Acadian poetry, Acadie is not a fixed place. It essentially is no place, “a place with no geographical beginning or end” (Chiasson 85), but it persists as a named culture. For Albert, it is located in memory throughout Bec & Call, and as a state of being – a people. In “Unnamed” this is rendered as her memories of Saint John’s road markers, but also as her self-ascribed wanderer status, and the pejorative leering she feels from Fredericton. “Unnamed” feels very much like a response to Herménégilde Chiasson’s poem “So You Won’t Fly Away,” a plea for fixed identity and a stable life in a “paradise” that nurtures rather than confines (Chiasson 19). Chiasson’s poem features anglophone boundaries which choke and limit francophones who flee their communities in search of home. Both poems feature a person identified as a green animal in flight.
“Unnamed” also complicates femme fatale tropes. The penultimate stanza is a shortcut through a wooded area. By anthropomorphizing her movement, “A stray skittering through backyards… / snaking between maples” (Albert 85), Albert invokes the image of the woman in the woods. But she does so in a way which disarms and recontextualizes such a reading. If she is the woman in the woods, then whose woods she occupies matters: they are the woods of the same place which objectifies her and the snake, which snidely rolls eyes at Acadians, and which confuses a boa for a python. This squares “Unnamed” among broader themes of Bec & Call, particularly in its frank depictions of female sexuality. In this way it reads as a decidedly feminist take on the Acadian “re-affirmation of the self” in Raymond Guy Leblanc’s work (Boudreau xix).
Ultimately what makes Venus and Albert both wanderers is their transplant from a comfortable environment to one in which they are othered, stripped of their identities. Fredericton echos a more welcoming home, one where the facts of their existences are not demonized by a community which derides them with assigned stereotypes – a community as choking in its construction as Fredericton’s frequent road repairs.
Works Cited (for analysis):
Albert, Jenna Lyn. Bec & Call. Nightwood Editions, 2018, pp. 30-85.
Boudreau, Raoul. “Poetry as Action,” Unfinished Dreams: Contemporary Poetry of Acadie. Edited by Fred Cogswell and Jo-Anne Elder, Goose Lane Editions, 1990, pp. xvii-xxvii.
Chiasson, Herménégilde. To Live and Die in Scoudouc. 1979. Translated by Jo-Anne Elder, Icehouse Poetry, 2018, pp. 19-85.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Albert, Jenna Lyn. Bec & Call. Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2018. Print.
---. “Bec & Call.” HA&L, samizdatpress.typepad.com. Web. Accessed 25 July 2019.
---. “Clairvoyance.” Dusie, dusie.blogspot.com, 7 Aug 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
---. “Date Night.” The Puritan, puritan-magazine.com, 2017. Web. 25 July 2019.
---. “Famille.” The Malahat Review 199 (Summer 2017): 76. Print.
---. “Riverhill Drive.” The Antigonish Review 48.191 (Autumn 2017): 40. Print.
---. “St. Anne’s Point.” The Antigonish Review 48.191 (Autumn 2017): 39. Print.
---. “Tongue-in-cheek.” World Poetry, worldpoetry.ca, 15 Nov 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
---. “Unnamed.” CV2 40.2 (Fall 2017): 59. Print.
---. “Well, I’ll be damned / Head & Heart / Mounting Tensions / Solarium, Solumn.” The Temz Review, thetemzreview.com, 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
Secondary Sources
Albert, Jenna Lyn. "Return to Scoudouc: A Review of To Live and Die in Scoudouc Translated by Jo-Anne Elder." Parallel Universe: the poetries of New Brunswick. Ed. Shane Neilson and Sue Sinclair, Victoria: Frog Hollow Press, 2018. 181-185. Print.
Beattie, Steven W. Rev. of river woman by Katherena Vermette, Bec & Call by Jenna Lyn Albert, and How to Avoid Huge Ships by Julie Bruck. Quill & Quire, quillandquire.com, 15 Oct 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
Dennis, Michael. Rev. of Bec & Call by Jenna Lyn Albert. Today’s Book of Poetry, michaeldennispoet.blogspot.com, 10 Oct 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
Johnson, Will. “Poetry Reviews.” The Malahat Review, malahatreview.ca, 2017. Web. 25 July 2019.
Albert, Jenna Lyn. Bec & Call. Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2018. Print.
---. “Bec & Call.” HA&L, samizdatpress.typepad.com. Web. Accessed 25 July 2019.
---. “Clairvoyance.” Dusie, dusie.blogspot.com, 7 Aug 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
---. “Date Night.” The Puritan, puritan-magazine.com, 2017. Web. 25 July 2019.
---. “Famille.” The Malahat Review 199 (Summer 2017): 76. Print.
---. “Riverhill Drive.” The Antigonish Review 48.191 (Autumn 2017): 40. Print.
---. “St. Anne’s Point.” The Antigonish Review 48.191 (Autumn 2017): 39. Print.
---. “Tongue-in-cheek.” World Poetry, worldpoetry.ca, 15 Nov 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
---. “Unnamed.” CV2 40.2 (Fall 2017): 59. Print.
---. “Well, I’ll be damned / Head & Heart / Mounting Tensions / Solarium, Solumn.” The Temz Review, thetemzreview.com, 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
Secondary Sources
Albert, Jenna Lyn. "Return to Scoudouc: A Review of To Live and Die in Scoudouc Translated by Jo-Anne Elder." Parallel Universe: the poetries of New Brunswick. Ed. Shane Neilson and Sue Sinclair, Victoria: Frog Hollow Press, 2018. 181-185. Print.
Beattie, Steven W. Rev. of river woman by Katherena Vermette, Bec & Call by Jenna Lyn Albert, and How to Avoid Huge Ships by Julie Bruck. Quill & Quire, quillandquire.com, 15 Oct 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
Dennis, Michael. Rev. of Bec & Call by Jenna Lyn Albert. Today’s Book of Poetry, michaeldennispoet.blogspot.com, 10 Oct 2018. Web. 25 July 2019.
Johnson, Will. “Poetry Reviews.” The Malahat Review, malahatreview.ca, 2017. Web. 25 July 2019.
