The Scarborough

The Scarborough takes place over three days in 1992: Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. It is the weekend 15-year-old Kristin French was abducted and murdered by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. In poems both opulent and stricken, ravishing and unflinching, Michael Lista-who was nine, at the time-revisits those dates, haunted by the horrifying facts he now possesses. Inspired, in part, by Dante’s Inferno , Virgil’s tale of Orpheus’ descent into the underworld for Eurydice, as well as the Bernardo trial itself-where the judge ruled that the gallery could hear the video tapes of the crimes, but not see them-Lista’s poems adhere to a single rule: you cannot gaze at the beloved you seek to rescue. The Scarborough is a shiveringly bold book about Bernardo that doesn’t show us Bernardo, a conceptual project that ignores its concept.