Danielle Hubbard’s The Electrocutionist jaggedly depicts a mother’s death set against the backdrop of a shattering extra-marital affair. Hubbard does not shy away from the contradictions, pains, and passions of infidelity. What does it mean to be loyal? To be guilty? To be the aggrieved? To both cringe and laugh as we wrestle for the truth?
Once upon a time, I considered myself a fiction writer more than a poet. Even in my poetry, I gravitate towards character, setting, and plot – the building blocks of fiction.
Then, in 2021, my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Bam, out of the blue. I was living in the prairies at the time, doggedly shepherding a library system through COVID, and floundering my way through an affair.
I resigned my job and moved home to support my parents. In the final months of Mom’s life, I challenged myself to write a poem every day. The poetry didn’t have to be good, and it didn’t have to be factually accurate. It just had to be emotionally true.
That was the birth of The ELECTROCUTIONIST, my multi-year grappling with Mom’s death, and how her death coincided with an affair that humiliated me, humbled me, and was ultimately my own doing.
Characters and plot points have been fictionalized, but not the feelings behind the events. I hope The ELECTROCUTIONIST reads like a story as much as a collection of poems. I still love those building blocks.
A million thanks to the mentors who have helped me along the way – Jennifer Still, Richard Harrison, and Yvonne Blomer, I’d still be wading through scrap paper if not for you.
The electric drive to run, run, run through a wrecking-ball affair, a marriage’s end, and a mother’s death.
Danielle Hubbard’s The Electrocutionist jaggedly depicts a mother’s death set against the backdrop of a shattering extra-marital affair. Hubbard does not shy away from the contradictions, pains, and passions of infidelity. What does it mean to be loyal? To be guilty? To be the aggrieved? To both cringe and laugh as we wrestle for the truth?
With a strong narrative arch, The Electrocutionist shocks life into a full caste of characters – narrator, husband, lover, mother, father, sisters – each of whom is treated to their own portrait poem. The twin settings of rural Manitoba and Vancouver Island come to life as characters themselves.
An electric physicality welds the collection together. What to do in the face of a mother’s terminal diagnosis? Run. When a secret affair crashes into the open? When a marriage cascades into knots and battles? When a husband leaves? Run, run, run.
Hubbard’s writing is both concrete and surreal, flailingly emotional and tongue-in-cheek. In the canon of Canadian poetry, The Electrocutionist takes its place as a bridge between the age-old tradition of romance, and the modern experience of flipping the bird to the old strictures of monogamy.