Onion Man
Onion Man was my first book published in 2011 by Tightrope Books in Toronto, a small press that is now closed.
It is a novel-in-verse set in London, Ontario during the late 1980s and was my first foray into autofiction, but at the time, I just called it poetry.
Since the press closed and the rights have reverted to me, I’m doing a re-boot of this project by republishing it on Send My Love to Anyone as a podcast called Onion Man 2.0 where I will record the book and shared behind the scenes details, publishing tales, music, and more.
Description
Onion Man is a sparse and intense series of linked poems told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl working for the summer at a corn-canning factory. The poems follow her relationships with her factory job, her boyfriend, her alcoholic mother, her terminally ill grandfather, and the man who every night “peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple.”
“In Onion Man Kathryn Mockler takes an age-old metaphor and applies it to the construction and consumption of the book: each page turned a layer peeled away, revealing through subtraction a poignant coming-of-age story and a razor-sharp dissection of gender and class relations set in late-1980s Ontario. Unlike much of the ‘work writing’ popular at that time, Mockler’s single stanza texts, solid as the cans of corn her narrator pushes down the line, transcend the story of their production, allowing for overtones many of us will recognize from our own teenage years. Wise, honest, familiar and insightful, this is a book I will read more than once.”
Michael Turner, author of Hard Core Logo and The Pornographer’s Poem
Onion Man by Kathryn Mockler Tightrope Books, 2011
Onion Man Backstory
Onion Man had a long path to publication. I started writing it in my mid-twenties, but it didn’t get published until I turned forty. I never gave up on the manuscript and continued to edit it and send it out faithfully throughout the years. It was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and excerpts of it had been published in Canadian literary journals. It received an OAC grant and was nominated for the K.M Hunter Prize. I had just enough hits on this manuscript that kept me going, kept me revising instead of just shoving it in a drawer.
Onion Man had pretty much been rejected by every small Canadian and many US presses until Tightrope Books picked it up in 2011. Shirarose Wilensky who worked at Tightrope at the time edited the manuscript. She was the perfect editor for this book. She provided me with keen editorial insights and shared with me materials about children of alcoholics giving me for the first time (I had not yet embarked on therapy) major insight into how my childhood impacted me as an adult. I will always be grateful for her time and attention to this book and the care with which she handled the subject matter.
The book did reasonably well for a debut if one keeps their expectations low. It was longlisted for the Relit Award and got some lovely reviews in journals. Over the years sometimes readers would tell me that they enjoyed it, and often those readers were young women, which always delighted me.
A few years ago Tightrope Books closed as is common in the small press world. The rights were returned to me, and I bought up the remaining copies of the book.
You can order the e-book or contact me to purchase a hard copy.
Kathryn Mockler is the author of Anecdotes.
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