Know Your Monkey is the debut poetry collection by Toronto novelist and screenwriter Elyse Friedman. Plainspoken yet vivid, funny yet poignant, these are poems that tell stories.

In “Bleeding & Laughing at Pineway & Cummer”, a group of teens “dizzy with spring and spirits and speed” race a van through the suburbs after grade nine prom. In “The Great Thing My Cousin George Did,” a man simultaneously drives two cars from Toronto to Hamilton: “100 yards then hop out/run back to/the other car/100 yards past the first car /and so on / and so on / with the polio / leg. In “Paradise Mural” we meet a woman at a Holiday Inn singles’ dance “who always tried to giggle / but it came off the gangplank of her tongue / like it had been / pushed.” Friedman writes candidly about her own experiences with love, family, and work. In “Screenwriting 101”, she rails against the formulaic rules that have come to govern the craft of movie-writing. In “Rescue” she fantasizes about being stranded on a desert island with Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski.

Never precious or inscrutable, Know Your Monkey gives us rhythmical slices of real and imagined life.