Encrypted

Encrypted
by Arleen Paré
Poetry
Caitlin Press, May 2025
83 pages
ISBN 9781773861647
$20.00
Reviewed by Elke Sorensen

 

Arleen Paré’s 10th poetry collection, Encrypted, details her 19-year-old grandson’s bouts with severe depression, anxiety, and a video-game addiction after he moved into her basement in September 2020 to study Computer Science. Due to his mental health challenges, Paré’s grandson dropped out of university. Paré turned to poetry to write poems to him, about him, and for him and others fighting similar battles.

The collection, which is referred to as one long poem in the acknowledgements, is strung together by epigraphs from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his work The Rime of The Ancient Mariner. The epigraphs work to compliment Paré’s recurring oceanic imagery, which is inspired by her home: Vancouver Island.

Each section of the long poem is untitled, but because Paré employs different forms, natural breaks can be found between sections. The poem beginning on page 31 takes the form of HTML coding and the “if-then” statement used in the field to enable decision-making:

if video games by night / / all night //;

// plus calculus in advanced stages of fear / /;

if life underground;

then order-in a pizza at 9:30p.m.;

if first-person shooter;

then days rotate to night / / include anxious depression / /;

if videogames addiction;

then dopamine depletion;

This poem is Paré’s attempt to understand and to speak her grandson’s language to reach him. Other poems in Encrypted directly reference the video games Paré’s grandson plays, as on page 53: “do you find meaning/in League of Legends conditions:/a warrior falls.”

On page 79 she writes: “or have you captured yourself/as if in a long game of Minecraft/

blocking the exits/with fake plastic brown Lego-type bricks.”

Although is it a writer’s duty to understand what she is writing about, Paré’s naming of the video games further displays the empathy she inhabits while addressing her grandson.

In some poems Paré is looking over her grandson’s shoulder, while others adopt distance and mimic Paré’s own anxiety. In the poem on page 78, Paré witnesses her grandson leave at 4 a.m. and writes:

the lights were out in every house on the street

                                    it was 4:23 and dark inside

every house on the street   hushed up

                                    no one else was leaving their house that night

                                    in the slashing impossible rain

Paré’s observations of, and confusion about, her grandson’s addiction work to create a multi-layered commentary on generational gaps, men’s mental health, and the screen addictions with which so many of us deal. Encrypted documents a grandmother and grandson’s strained relationship, video gaming, and COVID-19 Pandemic with empathy, subtlety, and wry tenderness.

Arleen Paré is a Salish Sea writer with 10 collections of poetry. She has been shortlisted for BC’s Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry and has won the Governor Generals’ Award for Poetry, the Victoria Butler Prize (for which she has been shortlisted five times), the bp Nichol chapbook award, the CBC Bookie Awards, and Golden Crown Award for Lesbian Poetry twice. She lives in Victoria with her wife.