RM Vaughan

[Excerpt]

Vaughan’s Troubled: A Memoir in Poems and Fragments (Coach House, 2008) is a book-length confession and self-reflexive analysis of the rise and fall of the poet’s love affair with his therapist. This includes everything from the early flirtatious sessions between patient and doctor, weekend getaways, physical and emotional abuse, the revoking of the therapist’s license to practice and, eventually, said therapist’s reinstatement.

Toronto writer RM Vaughan's fourth book of poetry, Troubled (Coach House, 80 pages, $17), is subtitled A Memoir in Poems and Fragments, and it's a successful and jarring genre collage.

Troubled is based on the painful story of Vaughan's own unhappy relationship with a psychiatrist, one that began in therapy and turned into a whirlwind sexual affair.

Troubled (Coach House Books), by Toronto's RM Vaughan, is a memoir, in verse, of a therapeutic relationship gone very bad. The protagonist seeks counselling from a psychiatrist, but the doctor is manipulative and controlling, and the two begin a sexual relationship.

Vaughan is brutally honest with himself ('Kitten stupid, I take the bait.') and scathing in describing his former doctor.

RM Vaughan at Pride's Proud Voices Reading Stage

By Monique Mathew, a budding writer, curator and OCAD graduate.

In blert, Jordan Scott gives us a kind of poetic abstraction of a completely different order than Karen Houle's (During). If abstraction is a disengagement from the familiar, then Houle's disengagement relies on the peculiarity of her syntax, so that we must ask ourselves what a word means given its position in a verse.