Just One Question for Margo Lapierre — THE NEEDLE AND THE KNIFE

Ajar (Guernica Editions, 2025), the second collection of poetry from Ottawa-based writer Margo Lapierre, is a remarkable piece of work. Visceral, unsettling, and meticulously constructed, it attempts to map the ways in which various versions of self converge and speak to one another, resulting in new ways of understanding and healing ourselves.

Ajar is available now from your local library and wherever you like to buy your books.

Kate: One of the central themes woven throughout your poetry collection Ajar is the notion that trauma and psychosis result in a nonlinear perception of time and of the self—that the past invades the future, that previous versions of ourselves exist simultaneously, or else bleed through time to haunt us in the present. Can you talk a little bit about this idea, and the role it plays in the book?

Margo: Our experience of time is linked to memory. We feel that time moves in such a way that it blows our hair back and ripples our T-shirts because memories accumulate as we decay. We identify with our memories in a way that most of us don’t with our imagined futures. That said, both clairvoyance and goal-oriented behaviour allow us to identify with that future person. It would be very strange, however, for someone to claim to have PTSD in response to an event that hasn’t happened yet, even though the symptoms listed for PTSD are nightmares, severe anxiety, uncontrollable thoughts, and flashbacks, all of which (if you swap premonitions in for flashbacks) may occur out of fear for the future. What’s to come doesn’t affect us in the same way the past does, which is not to say that the future doesn’t affect us. It does. Try getting even a “very nice deal” ($50,000–$99,000) in today’s publishing market for a novel whose protagonist doesn’t have a goal, or desire. Or who doesn’t transform between pages 1 and 200. Good luck. To be human means that what we want is more important than who we are or what we have. Our unconstrained desires extend in all directions. Desire aimed at the past, we call regret, or nostalgia. But what about causality? Can it, does it, extend in all directions?

“Fig 1 Grapefruit” Caption: A model of time from within.

“Fig 2 Zipper Model” Caption: A model of time from without.

Physically I am only ever my “now” self, which is the bloody, buzzy container for my past and future. In a sense, in some biological way—I’m no scientist, only a poet—past and future are equal.

This nonlinear perception of time assumes that the organization of one life is a little like a book. All the pages are there. The ending is written. As an author if I write a book, if I completely change the ending in revision, I should go back and adjust the beginning. Or even if I don’t, that new ending will colour my readers’ impression of the beginning differently than the old ending did. So, back to causality. Might there be such a thing as retrocausality? Events that affect the past? Can I, here responding to your excellent question at the white wooden table in my kitchen to the babbly, siren-like sounds of my husband and 7-month-old daughter playing in the living room, hold my younger, trying-to-die self in comfort? Does my existence today make her more likely to survive? By necessity, it means she survives. What if that haunted feeling I remember came from being object to the gaze of the me who survived, peering lovingly at the troubled, joyful, addicted, suicidal, exuberant me who almost didn’t? What if the young child who often felt so weird and outcast was accompanied the whole time? By her future? By me? ∞