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Once upon a time, you folded / around me like an envelope.
Confronting the contradictions, pains, and passions of infidelity, Danielle Hubbard’s new poetry collection jaggedly depicts a mother’s death against the backdrop of a shattering extramarital affair.
Following a strong narrative arc, The Electrocutionist shocks life into a full cast 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? When a secret affair crashes into the open? When a marriage ties itself in knots? When a husband leaves? Run, run, run.
Both concrete and surreal, flailingly emotional and tongue-in-cheek, The Electrocutionist bridges the age-old tradition of romance and the modern desire to explode the strictures of monogamy.
“Line after line in this book I read out loud, letting Hubbard’s words shape my voice: ‘Cellophane, Saran Wrap, monosodium glutamate. / I munch the inside of my cheek. / I mount the metaphorical monorail. I slather / salt on my omelet. // Monotremes are the last / egg-laying mammals. Whatever.’ This book is a song to the pleasures and dangers of life, words, the mortal body and all its languages. And because of that, it is also an elegy for the death of loved ones and a hymn to their memory.” Richard Harrison, Mount Royal University
“A tiny fuse burns inside these poems, a self set like a spark along exposed wire. Hubbard tests the capacity of desire, identity, and fidelity in a world made of yolk with all the appliances set on high. Here is the heart travelling on an alternating current, staying the course between domesticity and detonation. Hubbard shows us language as pure conduction.” Jennifer Still, author of Comma and the 2025–26 Winnipeg Poet Laureate