Shoshanna Wingate, Radio Weather: Poetry Review

In her debut book of poetry Radio Weather, Shoshanna Wingate finds beauty in the dark aspects of life and dark undercurrents in life’s beauty. These contrasting aspects permeate Wingate’s storied memories, indicating her belief that “Our stories, .../tell us who we are” (12).

       Wingate’s book creates a sense of home by paralleling childhood’s innocent discovery of the world with adult ponderings about life’s meanings, cruelties, and beauties. The concept of home is developed in “Secret Garden,” as the author discovers that her home is not the “cookie cutter kind,” but something “living,” that contains a personal history (35).  Wingate also achieves an understanding of home by accessible, conversational language, reminiscent of the simple yet profound diction in Judy Gaudet’s Conversation with Crows. Both collections treat topics deep and everyday with clarity.

As the poems move from childhood into adulthood, a sense of anxiety arises. A feeling of entrapment is evoked in Wingate’s long found poem, “Letters from Vietnam.”  These are excerpts from soldiers’ letters addressed to Wingate’s father, who counselled them on becoming Conscientious Objectors, thus making Wingate two steps removed from the trauma of the Vietnam war. Wingate uses “Letters from Vietnam”’s journey from ambiguous identity to desperate pleas for hope as a parallel for her own upbringing; despite one letter’s wish for the recipient to “raise/your child with peace in mind,” (46) she remembers a her father as a man who “doesn’t speak what you want to hear” (52).

In “AIDS Ward” Wingate continues to carefully craft entrapment by taking advantage of language’s multiple meanings as a result of enjambment. Broken lines create both resentment and sympathy for the relationship between Wingate and her father, and her father and his illness:  

This is the daughter untying the strap
        that restrains the man that lies

        in an empty room where he is dying
        on a floor full of rooms, emptying (53).

Shoshana Wingate

This creation of the feeling of claustrophobia is similar to that of J.J. Steinfeld’s Holocaust memoir Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds, where focus is given to individual identity, memory and dreams. However, Wingate’s ability to overcome the “dark…shadows,” (34) allows her to enjoy the promise that everyone – including herself – can find themselves “content in/knowing what we’ll find when we awake (59).

Radio Weather’s heartbreakingly honest stories move past moments of struggle to bring together various stages of life, love, death, and hope. Shoshanna Wingate’s “common language” (pace Wordsworth) considers beauty’s darkness, presenting readers an attainable hope found in the comfort of recognizing home.




Works Cited

Gaudet, Judy. Conversation with Crows. Toronto: Oberon Press, 2014. Print.

Steinfeld, J.J. Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds. Victoria: Ekstatis Editions Canada Ltd., 2014. Print.

Wingate, Shoshanna. Radio Weather. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2014. Print.


by Monica Grasse, with input from Ben Lord, Molly Strickland and Sharisse LeBrun.