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.