Screaming Obscenities at the Sky by Christian McPherson
Guest Review by Pearl Pirie
Screaming Obscenities at the Sky by Christian McPherson is its own little beastie of a book. From the outside or the inside, you know you’re meeting something different with the hand lettering reminiscent of 70s self-help or recipes. No impartial objective Times New Roman power differential between writer and reader. From the cover, and colophon, you already get the idea that this isn’t going to be a strait-laced bit with a bad case of stuffy poet voice.
“In accordance with Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790, At Bay Press expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception. Not that this statement matters. No one gives a shit about copyright. No portion of this work may be reproduced without express written permission from At Bay Press. Not that this statement will stop everyone from stealing the author’s work.
The poems are vivid, grounded and playful. Life is treated as something to be lived and valued and run in hard, skidding sideways to the finish. The authority of the page is interrogated with doodling (his word) through the table of contests and in margins, as headers, around and between poems, in the sort of style of Mad Magazine and surreal caricaturists. A lot of aliens and eyeballs, and self-portraits. In the introduction he explains its genesis was Woman in the Dust by Patrick Lane (1983) with its mad drawings throughout.
“ Some poets keep the reader at an objective distance. This poetry is more familiar. A poetry that hugs and whose laugh is heard above the ambient chatter.”
If a book’s too far off your wave length, it may expand your horizon or ride off without you. If a book is on your wavelength, then is there work done as a reader before you open the cover, although affirmations have a comforting place. If you don’t get one poem, like weather on Mount Washington, wait a minute and it’ll be different.
The offbeat irreverent nature from the get-go piqued my interest. It’s got poems that are earnest, comic, point blank, silly, both thoughtful and thought-provoking. The poems range over tones, moods, and densities in a gratifying way.
In the poem “When” (p. 43) we can consider together what living memory is.
“I was alive when Elvis was alive Elvis was alive when Billie Holiday was alive Billie Holiday was alive when Scott Joplin was alive Scott Joplin was alive when Wilhelm Richard Wagner was alive Wilhelm Richard Wagner was alive when Ludwig van Beethoven was alive”
It puts a pin in this map of history we’re riding like a magic carpet. It’s a head-spinningly short time to get to the 1700s. How ephemeral does it seem then for, example, for women to make 16% less than men instead of 25% less, or women to be able to have a bank account without husband or father, when with a few lifetime chains, women as property was unquestioned.
As he says in the book, which explains the title, “Look up at the sky and scream your guts out –/and see if you don’t feel better.”
We have made progress but we have to change the mentality of us vs them, the zero sum, the old ways. Take it from “Battleground”, p. 62
“So much we have fought So much more to fight come to me let me hug you let me absorb some of this pain and hatred take a pause cry Then when you’re ready grab your grenades of intellect put the saddle back on the beast prepare yourself because we are going back in armed to the teeth with empathy rocket launchers of understanding and bulldozers of compassion we have love on our side and that shit is napalm and we will bomb the hell out of them all!”
Sometimes the poems are anecdotes from the day, what the Indian take-out looks like, how people interact. Sometimes, they’re addressing the readers, “I make a candy basket of words/ for you/ use them for inspiration/hope/ or to unclog the sink// use them for whatever you need”
No one-note orchestra, see “Coat Rack” (p. 59), a simple observation, simply stated. In its entirety: “At work/all day/the coats/face each other/ rub up against/ each other like lovers// their owners/don’t share/the same hook.” That elegance could slide unnoticed right into a Nelson Ball collection.
It occurs to me that method acting could have applications to literary expression. Some people make their poem or book play a role, their shadowed self, or their aspirational self. There’s a controlled stage, a binding rhetorical objective to what is displayed.
But a poem’s full work is being itself, not performing itself for the puppeteer. It says what it needs to in the way that feels right. There’s an expediency pushing it out. It is worked until it looks effortless. No doubt many of these poems took a lot of editing to find their pace and grace, or anthemic rage.
McPherson brings his whole selves to a poem, door open to past and present, not a tiny curated sliver. He gives permission to let it all in to poetry, cherishing, anger, silliness, family, boredom. The quiet moments around the dining table with family, or being at a garden centre when Robin Williams died. (Do you recall where you were at that thunderclap?)
Screaming Obscenities at the Sky is poetry that doesn’t show the chalk lines of its birth as an exercise, not as thumb twiddler. It is writing when there’s something to say. (No poems of staring out windows and commenting for 500 words there’s a bird and there’s god. No insipid ritualized wallow.) Some while speaking plainly affect a slow good ole boys simulacrum of candour that fails the sniff test. Another might lean into the domestic as an excuse to lead to a plaintive profundity. This sidesteps these known Heffalump traps as well.
It makes me realize what I was missing, a sense of connection, in poetry. Some poets keep the reader at an objective distance. This poetry is more familiar. A poetry that hugs and whose laugh is heard above the ambient chatter. It’s poetry that talks to self comfortably, doesn’t use so much stage dressing. The set is minimalist, direct monologue through the 4th wall.
It’s an interesting collection, and it stands up well to a few re-reads.
About the Author
Christian McPherson is a poet and novelist. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and their two kids. He has written a bunch of books including, The Cube People, Saving Her, and My Life in Pictures. If he isn’t out walking his dogs, driving his son to hockey practice or his daughter to cheerleading, he is usually sneaking off to the movies.
About the Reviewer
Pearl Pirie is in Hills’ Almanach des Collines, an anthology of Gatineau Hills spec fiction 2026, and in The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, 2025 and a forthcoming issues of The Fiddlehead and Kingfisher. She is an English book reviews co-editor of Haiku Canada Review. Recently in chapbooks: Heat Lamp (above/ground press, 2025), We Astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), and edited for phafours press: Crime and Ornament by Tamsyn Farr (Nov 2025). www.pearlpirie.com
Book Details
Publisher: At Bay Press
Publication Date: Nov 27, 2025
Length: 170 pages
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-998779-83-3
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