Immersed in a fragmented culture of snippets of poems and pop songs, McCann positions Soft Where as a strange conglomerate of references and confessional lyric poems, at once dancing to a (obscure?) Mya song and aligning itself alongside Canadian luminaries like Lisa Roberston and Stephen Cain. Yet, for all its cultural posturing it still remains a suite of poems about the body and the often cheeky reflection of a young gay male growing up.

The strength of the text lies in this cobbling juxtaposition. Writing from a culture that zips through information at a stunning speed, the poems’ interjections of outside text inside deeply personal confession is reflective of most reader’s lives. “Memoir Parity Error,” for example, mixes Magnetic Fields lyrics with a lament for remembering, a strange poem that merges those lyrics with raw emotional reflection and computer language and syntax (“If you go bluescreen” and “Is this what you remember?, send.”). As the title of the text hints at, the body (and, in this poem, memory) is being outsourced to mechanical counterparts – here the narrator is attempting to regain that small space of memory, recalling and begging for that “latest version/saved much later.” By incorporating outside texts as direct quotes in amongst the disparate narrative events of the poems, the reader is able to draw fresh meaning from both texts.

This sense of concurrence also reflects well into the form of the text. Though the lines are decidedly (and sometimes distractingly) prose-like, the places that the text really resonates is in the use of phrasing and use of line breaks. The first poem in the collection, “Whoa” is illustrative:

Once we snuck under the junked Cutlass, chunky

Todd undressed some buttons, thumbed my undies’
broad band. What was the rush,

I thought we were going four wheeling?

The echo of broadband (as technological language) is emphasized by the enjambment of the previous line while the first hard stanza break between “chunky” and “Todd” let the reader dangle from the cliff of the end line. These choices in phrasing create a tension and unpredictability that helps to offset the prose line narration, a constant throughout the whole of the collection. These irregularities create the necessary space for the interesting juxtapositions that power the poems.

That said, the reader grows a bit weary of the overly-consistent form and voice. The voice powering the poems is engaging enough – it is cheeky and casual and provides the reader with a friendly entrance into the poems. Yet, the device of direct address (as in “Loaded-ness” and “Keep good cohorts”) becomes a bit tiresome and eventually distracting. Likewise, the form of the poems often seem redundant; the reader yearns for a bit of differentiation between poems to better reflect the content. Too often the poems fall into the trap of linear, almost photographic pieces reflecting some small moment of epiphany.

But where the poems are interesting is where the juxtaposition of content, in particular sound created by line breaks, overshadows the content and allows the strange imagery to run amok. It is this space, where the blending of computer vocabulary with communal pop culture and personal experience light into unique and intriguing relatable reflections, the reader can land and enjoy.