Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 13

Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Mothersalt

 

Like an object fromspace, birth language is a sign of alien life: Mucus plug. Meconium. Alsothe language of newborns, with its twisted syntax of sleepless nights andbleary, milk-washed mornings. Rooting, latch. Fore- and hindmilk.For now, this private lexicon of flutter kick, swim. What feels like a heart,tumbling through the body. (“MOTHERSALT”)

FromSan Francisco Bay Area poet Mia Ayumi Malhotra comes the collection Mothersalt (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), following her full-length debut, Isako Isako (Alice James Books, 2018) and subsequent chapbook, Notes from theBirth Year (Bateau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. “I ambeautiful with you. I wear you emblazoned across my face,” she writes, as partof the title prose sequence, “herald of my life to come.” Set with opening andclosing poems on either side of three sections of meditative, first-person lyrics,Mothersalt expands the boundaries of her Notes from the Birth Year,offering a book-length suite of poems that provide an exploration, a grounding,on pregnancy and mothering, motherhood and family. “Tell me again about mothering.About the form it takes.” she writes, to open the poem “ON MOTHERING.” There issomething deeply intimate and immediate about how she approaches these poems, akinto notes from a journal, carved and honed across graceful lines and still waters,run deep: “How language dawns slowly,” the opening poem, “WHERE POEMS COMEFROM,” offers, “then all at once. / The dry, whitish lid working its way, reptilelike,/ up the bird’s eye. This isn’t really about the duck, / the pointing. The pointis that I saw you seeing / a creature for the first time—paused motionless / onthe bridge, bits of debris shifting understood. / Every day you make some newutterance—ball, / more, meow—closing the space between the world/ you live in and your name for it.”

Mothersalt exists as a book of breath and simultaneousexploration of the interplay between lyric and motherhood, and how one mightinform or shift the other; of a rich and densely-lyric musicality, one thatapproaches the poem from the foundation first of form. It is fascinating to seethe shape of Malhotra’s approach, focusing her lyric as a conversation aroundform, both poetic and personal, and how the boundaries of each might beexpanded, well beyond anything she might have expected. “Tell me about the formmothering takes on the page.” she writes, as part of the poem “ON FORM,” a poemthat also includes:

When I became a mother,my lines began to grow less regular, less sculpted—and this itinerant prose didnot adhere to shapeliness.

Instead it spilled frombirth into death and questions of beauty, arranging itself as it wished.

An artful, yet imperfecttext.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Iryn Tushabe

Iryn Tushabe [photo credit: Robin Schlaht] is a Ugandan-Canadian writer andjournalist. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Adda, The Walrus,and in the trace press anthology river in an ocean: essays on translation.Her short fiction has twice been included in The Journey PrizeStories: The best of Canada’s New Writers. She was a finalist for the Caine Prize forAfrican Writing in 2021, and a 2023 winner of the Writers’ Trust McClelland& Stewart Journey Prize. She won City of Regina writing Award in 2020 and2024. Everything is Fine Here (House of Anansi, 2025) is her debut novel.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recentwork compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Everything is Fine Here has been out in the worldfor a month now. I’m still getting used to the spectrum of emotions whensomeone tells me they’ve read it. Previously I’d had short stories and creativenonfiction published in literary magazines and anthologies. What I’m learning sofar is that once it’s out in the world, the novel/story is no longer yoursalone. Now it belongs to you and everyone else. Readers bring their ownexperiences of the world to the story and interpret it in ways I didn’tanticipate. It’s a joy to hear these impressions and to participate in thedialogue sparked by the novel.

 

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry ornon-fiction?

 

Growing up in rural Uganda, my family didn’t have a lot of books andthere wasn’t a public library in my village. But we had no shortage of stories,folk tales mostly, that my many siblings and I told and retold each other. Theseemigane, as they are called in Western Uganda, are origin stories or evenmoralising tales attempting to respond to some of life’s biggest questions, suchas where did death come from? And yet the stories themselves can belighthearted, often featuring trickster characters and deities. They lendthemselves well to embellishment so each teller can apply their own narrative voiceand flourishes while keeping to the original plot. I often think about emiganewhen I’m crafting fiction, so perhaps that’s where my storytelling began.

 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Doesyour writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first draftsappear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?

 

A compelling idea will hit me and demand my full attention. But latelyI’ve learned to let even those ideas percolate for a week or two before Icommit anything to the page. I make notes on my phone if something comes tomind. That way I’ve done a lot of problem-solving before the actual writingbegins. My first drafts often ramble on for far too long, but I don’t worry toomuch about that now. I have writer friends who will tell me when I’ve writtenpast the natural ending of the story. I’ve learned to listen to the ones Itrust.

 

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an authorof short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you workingon a "book" from the very beginning?

 

It might begin with a situation or incident I have experienced, but thatcan only be the starting point, something to kickstart the imagination. But sometimesall I have is a strong sense of the mood or tone/atmosphere of the story. I’musually attempting short fiction or a novella; they are the forms I most adore.I get quite sad when a story I’m writing keeps getting longer because then I cansense that it wants to become a novel. And novels, though I enjoy them, areunwieldy things to manage. Especially if there’s plot involved, changing onedetail affects the whole and you have to keep track of everything. It canbecome exhausting, which is how writers block begins.

 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Areyou the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

 

I’m a very nervous public speaker, so public readings are tough. Part ofit might be that English is my second language. In a relaxed environment Ipronounce words clearly, no problem. But in front of an audience, I stumbleover words and get into my head about not being understood.

 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kindsof questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even thinkthe current questions are?

 

When I consider my very small body of work so far, I see that I’veconcerned myself, for the most part, with ideas of home, faith, and grief. Havingbeen born on the edge of Kibale Forest where I spent a lot of my childhood—itwas truly and extension of my backyard—I consider myself its daughter, and soI’m also always writing about the natural world and wildness, always trying tobring the more-than-human into the narrative. I suspect that I will continue toengage with these themes in some way.

 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in largerculture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer shouldbe?

 

I think the job of a writer is to tell stories of all kinds. Hopefullythose stories can show us a wide-ranging humanity and maybe even unsettle us,thereby sparking dialogue.

 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficultor essential (or both)?

 

Both, for sure, but absolutely essential. I didn’t always feel this way,especially as a beginner writer, but now I can’t imagine publishing anythingwithout the (sometimes annoying) nitpicking of a sharp-eyed editor.

 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily givento you directly)?

 

To approach revision as an act of love. Re-writing and editing can be longhard work, but there’s beauty in attending to a story, or parts of it anyway. Incoming back to it again and again until it is doing what you mean for it to do.Opacity is important in fiction, but too much of it will and you risk disorientingthe reader. How to strike the right balance? Well, for me revision has provenmost useful and fulfilling. It is nice to be able to trust the process, to believethat if something is confounding me today, I can bring myself back to it laterand try again.

 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short fictionto creative non-fiction to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

 

What I love about short stories is language and precision. Every sentenceor image in a short story has to earn its place on the page; there’s no spacefor anything extraneous. But a novel is less restricting, and that’s part ofits appeal. You have freedom to excavate far and away from the central idea andthen come back. Both genres have their strengths. I suppose part of the job forthe writer is to be intuitive and curious, and to pay attention to whatever formwill best serve a particular story.

 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you evenhave one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

 

I like to write in the morning after my kids are off to school and mypartner goes to work. I like the silence, just me and my steaming huge mug ofblack coffee. I’m always so grateful for that time to write. Sometimes I caneasily pick up from where I left off however many days ago, sometimes it isharder. Usually I can read something—a poem, a play—and get the wheels rollingagain.

 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (forlack of a better word) inspiration?

 

There’s something about listening to an audio book or a short story whilewalking or jogging that has proven effective lately. Often I’ll listen to booksI’ve previously read so that I’m not really too invested in the listening, andthis allows my mind to wander. (Did you know that Toni Morrison narrated allher audio books?)

 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

 

Lemongrass. And passionfruit fresh off the vine.

 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but arethere any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, scienceor visual art?

 

The natural world certainly, and visual art.

 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, orsimply your life outside of your work?

 

I often say I left Uganda Omukiga woman and arrived in Canada a Blackwoman. The shock was significant. I’ve been learning ever since what it meansto be a Black person or “a person of colour” making art on these stolen lands. Earlierwhen I was still in university, the women’s studies classes I took introducedme to Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde, women whose writing came rushing back to me yearslater when I was reading Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand. They andother black thinkers continue to inspire me and to provide me a kind of roadmap of the possibilities of language and how to tell stories with responsiblyand care.

 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

 

I went to film school at the University of Regina, but graduated in timefor Saskatchewan to axe the film tax credit that had made filmmaking possiblein this province. I’d like to write a screenplay some day, something to justifyall that money I spent in tuition.

 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you notbeen a writer?

 

I suppose I’d still be doing journalism full time. I love journalism and I’malways consuming news, but for me the job was stressful. Journalism requires alevel of confidence and assertiveness that I unfortunately lack. I’m a shyperson; I’m not comfortableasking tough questions and confronting people. Fictional characters I can probeand hold to account, but most actual people make me anxious.

 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

 

I started writing fiction during a brief period in 2015 when mypostgraduation work permit expired before my application for permanentresidency came through. Suddenly it was illegal for me to work in Canada,so my employer let me go. An immigration officer said I could stay in thecountry if I wanted while I waited for a decision to be made my application forpermanent residency. I started writing as a way to distract myself. I was alsotrying to make sense of this strange in-between place in which I found myself.What would happen if my application was denied? But writing fiction andcreative nonfiction quickly became a refuge for me. By the time I receive mypermanent residency status, I’d decided that I would practice journalism as afreelancer and devote the rest of the time to trying to become an author.

 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

 

I’ve just finished reading Jessica J. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forestand I’m in awe of how the author, by exploring the geological history of herancestral homeland of Taiwan, and through careful attention to the lives of hergrandparents, reaches a greater understanding of herself and her place in theworld. It’s a truly marvellous book.

 

The greatest film I recently watched is Sinners. It’s this genredefying piece of art that’s soulful and daring and deeply affecting. Thecinematography is gorgeous as is the sound track. I’m going to try and see it oncemore on the big screen before it leaves theatres.

 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a memoir-in-essays, but one of those essays keeps gettinglonger and longer so that I don’t know if it’s really still an essay orsomething else. But I’m not too worried about the architecture of things andthis stage. I’ll keep writing and see where I end up.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Amy LeBlanc, I used to live here

 

When a bird crouched
on Anne Boleyn’s neck
 

The sweating sickness
descends like a swallow
to rest in the throat—
if only she had keptrabbits
and held tears that couldfill
a thimble or a room,
she may have climbed down
from the tower and opened
an apiary or a bird sanctuary—
she could have been ahatter
like her great-grandfather
and named herself Alice.
When a bird crouched onAnne
Boleyn’s neck, no onestopped it
from pecking, pecking,pecking.

Thesecond full-length collection by Calgary poet Amy LeBlanc, following I know something you don’t know (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2020), is I used to livehere (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), “an examination of chronicillness, disability, and autoimmunity.” On the surface, I used to live here mightseem to hold echoes of ” Guelph poet Jessica Popeski’s The Problem withHaving a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025) [see my review of suchhere], but both are, instead, part of an expanding wealth of titles that connectthrough a conversation around “disability poetics,” a conversation that Gordon Hill/ThePorcupine’s Quill has been deliberately working to expand for some time, and alsomoves through titles such as Montreal poet Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s knotbody (Montreal QC: Metatron Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], Torontopoet Roxanna Bennett’s The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021)[see my review of such here], Toronto poet Therese Estacion’s Phantompains(Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here], Concetta Principe’s DISORDER(Gordon Hill Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Regina, Saskatchewanpoet Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press,2024) [see my review of such here], Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-ElizabethBest’s Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir Toxemia (Book*hug, 2024)[see my essay on such here] and Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s reissuedand expanded The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID:Ahsahta Press, 2015; New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) [see my review of the original edition here], among many other titles.

Acrossa quartet of first-person lyrics—section titles set as “The Leech House,” “SympatheticMagic,” “Something in the Water” and “Copse, Corpse, Catastrophe”—LeBlanc’spoems sit amid tightness and looseness, providing carved lines the spacethrough which they might properly breathe. “The doorbell chimes and you / wantto drill a hole through wires,” the title sequence begins, “pull them out of thewall and make / a bouquet. The babies cries and you hear / marbles clatter tothe floor. You / wish for your grandmother’s knocker— / vibration clippingagainst wood, / tremor in your kidneys when someone / arrives. Your baby cries.Thirteen / months old.” She writes on connection and disconnection, shades ofillness and disability, outreach and cultural touchstones, which allow her tospeak on and around what otherwise might seem more difficult. “Webspaces tug. Aboveher head,” she writes, as part of “Undead Juliet at the Museum,” “a nest restsin the rafters. A mother / magpie dives at museum guests, / just not at Juliet.Her father once said, / Things belong in museums when dead.”

Thegestures of LeBlanc’s second full-length collection write through witches, Shakespeare’sJuliet, Hecate’s daughter, Anne Boleyn, and even Gwen Stacy (Spider-Man’sgirlfriend, infamously killed by Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin in the 2014 flick Spider-Man2, but in the original books way back in 1973) in the poem “Gwen Stacy,”that begins: “The night Gwen died, / the Bow River                flooded / knocked / over /signs,      taxi cabs,          dog leashes turned loose / along thetide.” She writes of historical and fictional women not allowed their ownagency, beyond their associations to others. Or on illness metaphors, asthrough the poem “Counterpoints to / illness metaphors,” seeking an updatedlanguage to reframe or reshape a sequence of experiences too longmisunderstood, dismissed or outright ignored. “Not an alarm clock,” she writes,“a car with two doors / strip mall / inverted heart [.]” That does seem to bethe crux of this collection: seeking a new language to reshape and reframeperception around this particular lived experience; finding a new way to speakon illness and disability, for the sake of a far better understanding of whathas so often been compartmentalized as either imaginary or invisible. LeBlancwishes you, the reader, to better understand from the inside what you’ve onlyseen so far from the outside. Further to that reframing, LeBlanc alsoreferences infamous accused (but not convicted) American axe murderer LizzieBorden (1860-1927) [to whom I am distantly related, I will remind], as the sequence“Lizzie Borden takes an axiom” provides:

They tell you that myfather
twisted heads off
my pigeons. 

It’s a myth
but the hatchet
is fact. 

My laughter is fictitious
but my father made
coffins and I used
to climb inside
to avoid
small
talk.

Aisha Sasha John, total

 

THE HURRICANE VS. MYMOTHER’S COUNTRY

TO LAY IN BED AND HAVESOUP

BROUGHT TO ME AN ALSO

A COMMUNITY

INTELLECTUAL INTIMACY WITHELDERS

ONTARIO STRAWBERRIES

ROOM ADEQUATELY AISHA’D

ON SHOULD I LEAVE THEHOUSE

37 ON SATURDAY(““CONTINUANCE SYNONYM””)

Thelatest poetry title from Canadian performer, choreographer and poet Aisha Sasha John is total (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2025), following TheShining Material (Book*hug, 2011), THOU (Book*hug,2014) [see my review of such here] and I have to live. (McClelland andStewart, 2017) [see my review of such here]. I’ve always appreciated the wayJohn establishes movement and motion in her work, and the poems in thiscollection offer an urgency, a lyric of declarations and determinations, with agood percentage of the poems held in all caps to highlight her declarative,propulsive sentences. “INSIDE, ALONE, OKAY,” the poem “THE TIME TO QUIT AND BEQUIET” writes, “AND DID NEITHER CARE NOR LIKE // ABOUT WHAT I COULD NOT KNOWNOR NEEDN’T // I SAID TO THE CAT GET AWAY FROM MY BREAD! // GET AWAY FROM MYBUTTER, I SAID // (TO THE CAT) [.]” Hers is a lyric of agency, of urgency; ofdeclaratives and celebratory movement, and even those intimate moments at home,alone, with her beloved cat. Her cat appears enough through the poems that I’mreminded of Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s own instances ofincluding her own cat within poems, but in total, Aisha Sasha John’s catserves as a kind of grounding, meandering in and out of the text very much ontheir own terms, no matter what the narrative might be doing or saying,entering the action at random in the ways that only cats can manage. As hersequence “THE PLACE ELEGANCE ARGUES GRACE” writes:

DREAM OF BELLY BUTTONBETWEEN MY BREASTS
CLOAKED IN LABIA 

THAT MY RAGE MODELS HAVEBEEN MALE RAPPERS

FROM HEARING TO HEEDING

DEAR GOD: WHO AM ME?

THE CAT JUST UPCHUCKED ANDRE-ATE HER
CHICKEN TREAT

Builtacross eight sections of deep and expansive observational declarations, even thetrajectory of section-titles offers its own rich, narrative thread: “WOLF /NEST / PEACE OF MEET,” “I AM NEW TO EVENINGS.,” “THE SPIRITS IN THE CORNER ANDTHE CAT,” “I AM ‘SELFISH’ AND I AM RICH.,” “YOU’VE CALLED FAITH ‘GOD’ AND DOUBT‘THE DEVIL’,” “BUT THEN I THOUGHT WHAT IS WILDNESS, OR WHAT WORTH IS WILDNESS,WITHOUT THE STRUCTURE OF DEVOTION,” “‘ONE’S PERSONAL HISTORY, WHATEVER ELSE ITIS, IS A HISTORY OF ONE’S OBEDIENCE’” and “‘I DO FEEL SOMETHING BACK HERE. BUTIT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE PAIN. IT FEELS LIKE KNOWLEDGE.’” “FIGURED OUT WHAT AGALLERY IS/DOES,” she writes, as part of “HOW DID A NUB OF GINGER END UP I THEBED?,” ‘THEY ARE LIKE CHURCHES WHERE ONE CAN PURCHASE / THE FURNITURE [.]” Aperformer and choreographer, as well as a poet, Aisha Sasha John utilizes danceand movement in ways very different than Chicago poet Carrie Olivia Adams has,through her chapbook-length multidisciplinary poetry-dance work Grapple(above/ground press, 2016), or Brooklyn poet Brenda Iijima, through her choreographicaccount of somatic involvements in her expansive book-length poem Bionic Communality (New York NY: Roof Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Inmany ways, the poems of total feel less akin to poems than a performanceset as text, utilizing the poem purely as the form through which Aisha Sasha John’sgestures are provided form, a form propelled through the very movement of herspeech, one set through desire and an almost liquid motion. If Christian Bök,as I’ve previously argued, is a conceptual artist (as opposed to a “workingpoet”) who just happens to be working within the form of the poem, Aisha SashaJohn’s total feels akin to a one-woman dance and performance project, movingthrough the ebbs and flow of a singular performance, one that is deeply set toa particular music that shines through and across her language.

WE ACCESS THE MIRACLE

Through ease
Is the hypothesis.
The task is to sourcefrom the quiet 

Instruction
And from confusion
The instinct organized 

As impulse and
Into my arms asextension.
I walk back to the hotel 

With two limes and awatermelon.
Tonight:
Water and watermelon.

Jennifer Hasegawa, Naomie Anomie: A Biography of Infinite Desire

 

But everywhere,
the child came through
the kiawe trees. 

Ashes to lashes,
dust to lust.
They sang it to scare
the big-time, red-eyed
shadow-stealer away. 

Bottlebrush
and mosquito punk,
they scrubbed through
epochs of moss. 

Glow of molten rock
seeped between branches
to illuminate
a true name. 

Such monomythical sounds
made sluggish blood
flow free again. (“TombstoneRead Mama Cuz They Forgot Her Given Name”)

Itis very good to see a second collection by San Francisco-based (by way of Hilo,Hawai’i) poet and community activist Jennifer Hasegawa, her Naomie Anomie: A Biography of Infinite Desire (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), following herfull-length debut, La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living (Omnidawn,2020) [see my review of such here]. The back cover of Naomie Anomie writesof how this book is “an experimental poetic take on biography, growingincreasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narratorthrough paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawedlife, a symptom of looming omnicrisis, and a lyrical experiment intruth-telling.” The opening poem, “Her First Word Was No,” for example, offers:“Feline teeth / in her brown rolls / of baby flesh / gave her night vision. //Each morning, she watched father / open a tin of tuna / using a tiny opener, /like a folding quarter. // Returned it / to the same spot / on a shelf / oneach day / of an entire life.” The poems of Naomie Anomie are set as a quartetof poem-sections that offer first-person biographical moments across a widertapestry, titles that often anchor poems into narratives that the resultingpoem swirls around and away from, held only in place, at times, through thatelement of title. As the poem “After the Old Hilo Wastewater Treatment Plant”offers: “And she / floated around the backseat / in a soap bubble / asadrenaline / taught her new things. // Where is it easiest / to hide the truth?”

Movingthrough the poems of Naomie Anomie, I find the narrator less unreliablethan considering this a suite of poems offering something beyond simply citingfacts or replicating scenes from memory—one does not need to speak of thingsthat happened, precisely, to offer the truth—and her use of the surreal can beused to depict a scene with far greater accuracy. “Nuclear reactions / heldhands / to broadcast stories / of great bears / and damned maidens / chained tosea rocks. // By sunrise,” writes the poem “Stoners in the Hands of an AngryGod,” “her pupils small / and horns fallen away, / a stream of tiny paper tabs/ flew out of her mouth.” It is as though Hasegawa utilizes the facts ofrecollection as a means to an end, and not as the end-point; using facts as sheis able as building blocks towards something other, whether for the truth ofthe matter, or through working the mechanisms of best serving the sound and theplay and the language of her lyric. I don’t consider the narrator unreliable, Isuppose (although many of these narrative depictions do read as relativelystraightforward, compared to certain other contemporary poets working the surreal),as I’m not working my way through these poems to assemble a biography for thenarrator and/or author. “Neighbors set fire / to their garbage/ in a big irondrum / right outside / her bedroom window.,” the poem “Hatshepsut’s ConceptionWas Through a Divine Wind” writes, “What skills / might she learn / by inhaling/ the discards / of others?” As part of a “Process Note” on the collection for periodicities:a journal of poetry and poetics, Hasegawa spoke of how she worked toarticulate memory without romanticizing or allowing sentimentality to overrunher lyrics. “It is not that I don’t want people to feel anything when readingmy work. I don’t want to force-feed feelings.” Her short essay continues:

For me, it’s the subtlefeelings that ripple out from reading a poem. I love a poem that’s just on theverge of losing logical comprehension, and the way it can still evoke a subtlefeeling in the reader. And that subtle feeling, whatever it is, is the poem’strue purpose for that reader.

Herapproach to these poems provide for movement and sound over an adherence to biographicalfacts, allowing the flow of her lyrics their own agency, while utilizing the toolsof her experience over adherence to straightforward narratives, and sheachieves this to powerful effect. She’s been consistent about her approach,also, and the new essay follows along with how she described her process two years prior, as part of her statement in the “Spotlight series,” writing: “Myapproach to poetry is based on randomness, memory, and emotion. In my case,these things operate and move like a chain.” A chain, as she writes, continuinga trajectory and legacy not far off from what American poet Charles Olson wrotesome seventy-five years ago through his “Projective Verse”: “ONE PERCEPTIONMUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.”

Junie Désil, allostatic load

cancel Calm, and appslike Focus, Zen, and Freedom
the ones that liberatetime.
close all the two hundredand fifty-two open
tabs on my phone aboutself-care, mindbodygreen,
sourdough recipes,listicles, BuzzFeed, Bored Panda,
20 FACTS ABOUT MARLONBRANDO
and other articles like “HowI Stopped Working
for the Man and BroughtIn
over Six Figures a Month,”says the rosy-cheeked
french-manicured blondinfluencer. 

cancel all my health-typesubscriptions,
turn off all my notificationsand reminders
to drink water, to get upand stretch for thirty seconds,
to box breathe, cancelpreviously free now not-free pandemic
subscriptions during myshort-lived shelter-in-place
aspirations of knitting,breadmaking, preserve making,
guitar playing,indie-film watching. 

put on my noise-cancellingearphones
and actually – i want toso much –
rest.

Thesecond full-length collection by British Columbia poet Junie Désil, following eat salt │ gaze at the ocean (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020) [see my review of such here], is allostatic load (Talonbooks, 2025), a collection titled aftera term coined by Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar in 1993, referring specificallyto the wear and tear on the body that accumulates as an individual is exposedto repeated or chronic stress. As the cover copy informs, the poems in this collectionnavigate “the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuousyears marked by global racial tensions, the commodification of care, and theburden of systematic injustice,” specifically one that seeks to “hold thevulnerability and resilience required to navigate deep healing in a world thatdoes not wish you well […].” Across detailed, intimate and meditative lyricstretches, Désil offers first-person explorations and exhaustions across thedifficulties of navigating not only her own particular wear, but a medicalsystem determined to undermine her experiences. As she writes as part of thepoem “in the doctor’s office,” near the opening of the collection: “when ilook at you / and people of your ethnicity // i would say youshould / start on Metformin. // scrawls on her notepad she /tells mehave a think.” Throughout, Désil attends the long line, the ongoingthought, one that extends within and between each poem, less a narrative than asweep, a suite, a flow.

at work when i log in
my emails number in thethree digits.
still. emerge from myfour-day
migraine 

and previous to that mytwo-week
vacation working-at-home-catching-up
staycation, and previousto that a number 

of breaks that have donenothing
to bring my stress orworkload down. i start
the twentieth to-do list 

that never gets shorter
and my heart begins itserratic
thumping.

Thereare echoes here of other medical-themed titles, titles that examine physicaland emotional vulnerabilities in fearless and revealing ways, whether Ottawawriter Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir Toxemia (Toronto ON: Book*hugPress, 2024) [see my essay on such here], New York City poet Elizabeth T. Gray,Jr.’s After the Operation (New York NY: Four Way Books, 2025), Regina,Saskatchewan poet Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON:Palimpsest Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] or Toronto poet ThereseEstacion’s Phantompains (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Désil’s allostatic load, alternately, also offers anadditional series of layerings, as the poem “on a particularly bad year-longstretch” affirms, writing: “of racial injustice, extrajudicial killings // workmicroaggressions / general climate of anti-Blackness // my body expropriated –pain / wouldn’t let me out of bed // my body—was this betrayal? or /affirmation[.]”

Setwith single-poem “prologue I” (“searching for indicators”) and three numbered section-clustersof poems—“allostatic load,” “weathering” and “medicine”—the first two sectionsholding a single-poem “prologue II” (“Coping Like John Henry”) between them,offering a suite of poems in slow build, a spread-out and accumulativedescription of stress, excess, medical complications and stressful interactionsbefore the eventual emergence into something that might provide salve. This collectionasks: What does care look like through such perpetual onslaught on the senses? Howmight care even be possible? “when the medical-office assistant ushers me down thehall,” begins “on my Nth visit to yet another medical professional,” “and asksme to get on the scale / it fails to tell her that the number reflects / thecares i neglect to dispense, / emails i forgot to dispatch – including the onessitting / rent-free in my brain, the owed return phone calls, / and textmessages, and emails, and to-dos, / and 252 open tabs, and / unfinished conversationssettling in my chest, / on my hips, in my thighs. i eat my feelings / becauseit’s unacceptable to have them, no that’s not / true. i portion control my emotionsand keep / my mouth busy so as not to earn the angry Black woman / badge.”

Aswell, I appreciate this mention of, this linkage to, Cecily Nicholson’s poetry title prior to this current one [see my review of such here], allowing aconversation between these two titles, connecting the narrator and experience ofone to the other, both poetry collections writing of and around colonialism andrace, and of finally attempting a sequence of grounding, sustainability and responsibility,through working their hands through the soil. As Désil writes as part of thethird and final section, “medicine”:

i read HARROWINGS whileoverturning soil on abandoned beds,
violently hacking theblackberries back, burning piles of thorny,
snake-thick vines. the blackberrybushes have invaded and
colonized the beds andthe surrounding soil, choking the male
kiwi tree – alsooverbrown, its branches braiding beautifully
as it drapes. slash throughthe uneasiness – on this soil that i
tell people is home – here.the three goats i’ve inherited browse
nearby on the blackberrybushes that we haven’t gotten to. later
they will sit contentedly,stare, regurgitate their earlier meal.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Miranda Schreiber

MirandaSchreiber [photo credit:Sarah Bodri] is a Canadian writer and researcher. Her work has appeared inplaces like the Toronto Star, The Walrus, the Globe and Mail,BBC, and the National Post. She has been nominated for a digitalpublishing award by the National Media Foundation and was the recipient of theSolidarity and Pride Champion Award from the Ontario Federation of Labour. Iris  and the Dead is her debut book.

1- How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent workcompare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Writingthis book felt extremely time-sensitive because there was a certain perspectiveI wanted to communicate from. I felt like I had about a year-and-a-half. Iintended the book to be forward-facing, like an opening of a set of questions,so I would like to look into those more in the future.

4- Where does prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short piecesthat end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?

Forthis book I started with a sixty-page document and then gradually filled it in.I was always worried about saying too much and I was always trying to keep itshort even after I decided it felt more like a book than short fiction. It’salso kind of a letter and the character being addressed is theoreticallyfundamentally distracted, so attention was a concern throughout.

5- Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you thesort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Ifind that written work sounds better spoken  usually, although some of it is lost. Talkingabout reading can be social but it’s really a solitary act, almost inherentlyso. Maybe the best way to experience writing is through reading alone, butreading out loud can be a helpful, elaborative part of making a book.

6- Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds ofquestions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think thecurrent questions are?

Idefinitely do. I think it’s important for writing to have a political position,and I try to resist falling into a nihilistic or relativistic perspective. Idon’t like the theory some stories end with that effectively says, well, sowhat? I hope that writing can attest to the sacredness of human existence, thatit is essentially better to write your friend a message than to ask ChatGPT todo so because for our own safety we must maintain our freedom of thought andexpression. I think it’s an important time to believe that things actually domatter.

7– What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Dothey even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Idefinitely prefer writing that sets out a serious, objective claim but isn’tcruel. There is something really, really boring about writing that iscontemptuous of most people. This kind of work is usually just repeating whatthe most powerful people in the world want us all to think about each other. Ithink good writing figures out how other people, and we ourselves, have beenlied to, and – within reason – finds points of commonality among us.

8- Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult oressential (or both)?

Workingwith a good outside editor who is invested in the work as art, not as acommodity, is literally amazing for me. It gives the text its own life whensomeone else can tease out an aspect for further development. Of course it hasto be the right person.

9- What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to youdirectly)?

Thebest piece of advice I’ve ever heard is something my grandpa used to say, whichis that where there is breath there is hope. I think as an assertion it’s kindof the antidote to fascism. It elevates life over productivity and endows humanexperience with certain rights.

10- How easy has it been for you to move between genres (non-fiction to fiction)?What do you see as the appeal?

Ifeel more natural writing fiction, and I feel more convinced when I’m writingin that genre that the work is actually finished when I send it off. Argumentsmade through non-fiction I think have to be incredibly specific andanticipatory of the reader’s healthy skepticism, particularly if they arechallenging the climate of opinion in some way.

11- What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one?How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Itry really hard to keep writing as something I can theoretically do anywhere,independent of where I am or what time it is. I do find I write best if I’malone, or at least no one can see what I’m working on. When I start getting toopicky about where I feel like I can work I hear my Czech grandma saying “justsit and do it.”

12- When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack ofa better word) inspiration?

Favouritepassages from literature I think are a good place to come back to, no matterhow I feel about something I am working on. Music, nature. I think anythingrelated to the sublime is inherently generative and plays a role in artisticexpression.

14- David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there anyother forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visualart?

Ithink all of those forms are influential. I did a lot of reading of scientifictexts and the philosophy of science for Iris and the Dead, especiallyancient Greek science. Certain songs were also determinative in how Iapproached it as a project when I was conceptualizing it. I like the approachsome musicians have to their craft: the fixation, the relentlessness.  There is something very theatrical, sort ofepic, about it that can be a good template.

19- What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Thelast great book I read was Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu Miaojin.The last great movie I watched was the documentary Drunk On Too Much Lifeby Michelle Melles.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Laynie Browne, Apprentice to a Breathing Hand

 

T hread

Vice is in—advice. Insidethread is—read, and red. Also, dear—

A mind made of drills, atentacle audience, personal scarlet,
potions of temporality 

Do you squint as she approaches,toward large glass walls,
carrying needle andbroom, carrying music tied soundly to lack? 

Will you revolve acres onpaper, paste onto envelopes? Invite
beams of light to kneel? 

Have you ever writteninstructions to yourself, bereft of
apprentices? 

Do you remember how tosinge fine power, how to turn twinge to
dawn? 

How to rise up and twistthreads together until they learn to
cling—until—like lettersyou find your strand

Thelatest collection by Philadelphia poet, writer and editor Laynie Browne is Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), composed as a “responsetext” to the work of American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. This collectionfollows a thread of response texts Browne has been working for a number ofyears, including: In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press,2018), composed as a response to Lawn of Excluded Middle by RosmarieWaldrop; Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], composed as a response to the book The Unfollowing by LynHeijinian; and Everyone and Her Resemblances (Pamenar Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], composed as a response to the epic structures andpurposes of Alice Notley. It has been interesting to really begin to see the rangethrough which poets have been responding to the work of other writers over thepast few years, from the ongoing poem-essays by Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall[see my review of one of his recent titles here; see a more recent interview I did with him here] and Montreal poet andtranslator Erín Moure’s Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via themodernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON:House of Anansi Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], to Montreal-basedpoet, writer and critic Klara du Plessis’ intimately-critical prose through theten essays collected in her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: GaspereauPress, 2023) [see my review of such here] and Edmonton writer and critic JoelKatelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of CalgaryPress, 2024) [see my review of such here], a collection of essays, ofresponses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian,Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte,Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing theauthors’ own words. It is through the how of the response that provides and propelsthe possibilities of engagement, wending simultaneously through the deeply criticalto the intimately personal to elements of the festschrift.

As part of an interview I conduced with Browne lastyear on this particular and ongoing interest in response texts, posted onlineat periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, Browne responded:

I think it began with atremendous sense of gratitude, to be here in this time, with these particularpoets. Unmistakably my life as a poet is possible, in large part, because ofthese female poets. The first homage text I wrote was for Bernadette Mayer. Iwas re-reading The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, as ayoung mother, and I was amazed. Thus began my book The Desires of Letters.I’m writing another book for Bernadette now, which I began on the day of herpassing.

My dear friend, theextraordinary poet Stacy Doris, who left us much too soon, told me when herfirst book came out, that one poet she greatly admired appreciated the book,and that was more than enough for her. I just love this way of thinking ofpoetry as intimate and written not only to any reader, but also to a particularreader.  Many years later the poet SawakoNakayasu, also a friend whose work I admire greatly, echoed this idea of anaudience of one. When I wrote the book for Bernadette I didn’t know that Iwould continue in this vein, and it was many years before I wrote anotherhomage text. Sometimes there is a very specific formal relationship between mybook and a book by the writer I am writing for, and other times the relation ismore conceptual or oblique. 

Fromshorter poems to longer lyrics, the accumulation offers lines of extended lyricthought, as a kind of ongoingness, one set in three sections: “Apprenticeto a Breathing Hand,” “Euphoric Rose” and “A Self-CombedWoman.” I’ll admit I’m not familiar enough with Bersenbrugge’s workbeyond a collection or two, so can’t really speak to the source material andoffer comparisons, but Browne’s rhythms and phrases riff akin to bouncing ballacross the line, the lyric, the lyric sentence, and even make me more curiousabout examining her source. What becomes interesting, in part, through thiscollection is how she doesn’t overtly specify the approach or prompt of thesepoems, allowing them to speak on and through their own merit, allowing the responseitself to be the response, and not her particular framing or starting-point. Sheoffers acrostics, offers poems that begin with borrowed phrases, and otherstructures to work her way in, around and through her source material. As shewrites mid-way through: “I seal my intention to think less poisonous thoughtsby following / a path of letters [.]” Or, as the poem “Elusive” begins:

First advice, if you can’tfind your desk. Or if you don’t have a desk.
You still have to cleardebris. First the horse’s head, then the bird
outside the frame 

Then the window. Then theone forsaken leaf, orange and
dessicated, caught inabandoned web 

Push the calendar awayfrom the floating heart given to you by
radiance of undoing 

If your light fallsadamantly forward, scarring your efforts, see this
as kissing paper 

Look carefully at thefortunes pasted around you. If you find
carnelian, take off yourhands

 

Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, ed. Joseph Shafer

I’m so pleased to be hereand of course one of my difficulties in life is not just writing poetry; it’scollecting my particles and wondering what I’m supposed to do where, so I thoughttoday was going to be a discussion, of what the poem is about, so I brought apoem on Anne-Marie Albiach. About two weeks ago, at home, I was looking throughsome old diaries that of course weren’t completed but still had white pages andI saw at the top of one page—oh this was ten, fifteen years ago—“Wrote a letterto Prynne,” “Received book from Anne-Marie Albiach,” and, in little brackets, “Sheinspires me,” and now that I know her and know her work more, she inspires memore. So there was a birthday celebration for Anne-Marie in San Francisco and Iwrote a poem to her in celebration of this, of her, of her poetry, and after I’dfinished it, I realized that what I’d written about, because she is very muchon my horizon, that I’d written about the process of writing a poem. So I’mgoing to read this [poem, “Startling Maneuvers”] and we’re going to discuss it—Mei-mei’sgoing to tell you what it means… [laughter]. (“A Talk on ‘Startling Maneuvers’,”1998)

Thereis a lot to admire across the three hundred-plus pages of heft in Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest (Middletown CT: Wesleyan UniversityPress, 2025), edited with an introduction by Joseph Shafer and foreword byMarjorie Welish. Assorted, it is called, as it is neither collected norselected, a process of assemblage, “six decades of writing on literature andart by one of the most significant poets of our time,” the late Brooklyn poet Barbara Guest (1920-2006), a poet who first came to prominence as one of theNew York School. “Barbara Guest is a poet, first and foremost. And so, whenreading her writings otherwise, it is with this vocation in mind.” writes MarjorieWelish, to open her “Mysteriously Defining the Foreword.” “A celebrated NewYork School poet, Guest assumes that daily life, the intimacy of conversation,and friendship real or imagined are ever at hand. Presupposed also is thecultural life of the city: cafés, painters’ studios, bookshops—at least as NewYork was in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But she sees all these as prompts forwriting through an imaginative style that invents worlds she knows are out ofreach as projected fantasies of another time and place, and yet worth thechallenge: the challenge to make of style a palpably lived atmosphere.”

Thebook is assembled into thematic sections—“LECTURES, ESSAYS, & POETICPIECES,” “PROFILES,” “H.D.,” “OTHER FICTION” and “REVIEWS”—the breadth of suchshowcase a writer and thinker deep in the trenches of artistic engagement. Shewrites on her own practice, and the work of numerous writers and artists surroundingher, including Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Richard Tuttle, Helen Frankenthaler,Piet Mondrian, Anne Waldman, Kenneth Koch, Dennis Phillips, Robert de Niro (Sr.),Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Harry Mathews, Anna Balakian, James Schuyler, LouiseBourgeois, Robert Duncan and numerous others. Her work displays a curious mind,one deep in the thick of it. As Guest quotes from Plato in her piece “Forces ofImagination,” cited as a “talk delivered in April 1999 at Guest’s award ceremonyfor the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry by the PoetrySociety of America”: “If any poet were to come to us and show his art we shouldkneel down before him as a rare and holy and delightful being, but we shouldnot permit him to stay. We should anoint him with myrrh and set a garland of woolupon his head and send him away to another city.”

I’mstruck by numerous lines throughout this collection, including her openingcommentary on a poem by French poet and translator Anne-Marie Albiach(1937-2012), the opening paragraph of that particular lecture I quote above, atthe offset of this particular review. Further along in the same piece, respondingdirectly to that particular poem by Albiach, Guest offers: “My interpretationof this is that when you come to the point in a sensibility when you’reapproaching a poem, that is the preparation, and there is always a stasis,which contains balance and then non-movement. You are prepared to move but you’restill balancing yourself. And the pull in the composition, which is physical becauseit has to announce itself and it announces its frailty, its physical presence,and that’s why its tug is phantom-like. And it’s beginning to have its phantom-shadowon the poem. And this pull is so extraordinarily important because if you don’tfeel the pull between the poem and you, then you somehow or other don’t manageto produce anything that has much energy.”

Asmost books of this nature, this scale, have worthy stories to tell of how theycame to be, this particular project’s timeline is a bit longer than most, as editorJoseph Shafer writes to open his introduction:

In the summer of 2004,Barbara Guest signed two contracts with Suzanna Tamminen, the editor atWesleyan University Press. One was for a collected poems and the other for acollected prose. The projects were actually proposed together five yearsearlier in 1999, after Wesleyan published Guest’s Rocks on a Platter: Noteson Literature, a turn-of-the-century quasi-manifesto in the spirit of StéphaneMallarmé’s Un coup de dés. But several years went by between that initialproposal and the eventual signing because Guest and Tamminen were busy publishingMiniatures and Other Poems (2002). Once those contracts were filed,conversations about what either a collected prose or poems would entail had tobe postponed as their attention was directed back toward the release of TheRed Gaze (2005). Thus, when Guest passed away on February 15, 2006, neithera collected poems nor a collected prose had taken shape.   

I’lladmit, I’ve been aware of Guest’s work for some time, but have only takencursory glances at The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan, 2013),a project begun while the author was still alive, but completed by herdaughter, Hadley Baden-Guest, for the sake of publication. A collection such asMeditations, offering her conversation and thinking on writing andvisual art, I would argue, makes for a remarkable entry point to her work, onerife with stellar lines and numerous prompts into other directions. Her work onH.D. (1886-1961) alone is intriguing, and would make for an interestingcounterpoint to the extensive work by Robert Duncan (1991-1988) [discussed at length by Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn through his own essays, which I reviewed here], which she references as well, within her pieces assembled here.“Since the completion and publication of my biography of H.D.,” she writes, toopen “The Intimacy of Biography,” “I now realize that I have been seeking thatspecial state of grace I had experienced while writing this book, and this hasdeparted with the disappearance of H.D. and her companions from my immediatelife. I reach out in search of that powerful light, or that sombre candle thatlit the landscape of my own life as I struggled through the successive vales ofa heretofore uncharted realm.”

Separately,I’ve heard talk of Norma Cole co-editing a forthcoming new volume of collectedor selected poems of Guest’s poems, which is intriguing, given the fact thatthe prior volume assembled all of Guest’s published work. It makes me curiousat the framing, the argument, of this upcoming collection. Will it include workpreviously uncollected, unpublished or otherwise unseen? Or will it focus moreon certain aspects of her larger publishing history, certain collections, witha refreshed or expanded framing? Either way, I am intrigued.

Cecily Nicholson, Crowd Source

 

those eyes
lined in laughter 

fawned
from the floor up 

understory
as the
            flies
I hike
carrying my body 

to elevation
to rest 

a col between
two sisters’
snowy peaks 

the alpine air
quality up close 

trace elements

ancient
volcanic vents

Thefifth full-length poetry title by Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson, following Triage (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), From the Poplars (Talonbooks,2014) [see my review of such here], Wayside Sang (Talonbooks, 2017) [seemy review of such here], which won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, andHARROWINGS (Talonbooks, 2022) [see my review of such here], is CrowdSource (Talonbooks, 2025). According to the back cover, Crowd Source“parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season,journey across Metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. ContinuingNicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, andBlack diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practicingecological futurities benefitting corvid sensibilities.” While fellow BritishColumbia poets such as Kim Trainor, through A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] and MattRader, through his FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here], focus their conversation through the lyric around climate andwildfires, or Manitoulin Island poet sophie anne edwards, through Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talonbooks, 2024) [see my review of such here], focusesher climate conversation as a lyric study around a particular river, Nicholsonfocuses her own lyric conversation, her own particular study, through climate,colonialism and urban crows. “on the grounds / two of us stop to watch / acampus corvid of the oaks / right a small container still full / of dipping sauce,”she writes, as part of the book’s fifth section, “garbage, all of us /providing so much garbage // invisible until I am seen / in proximation [.]”

Heldas a book-length suite in thirteen numbered lyric sections, Nicholson’s extended,expanded sequences are stitched through fragment and ongoingness, stretching asingle line along a book-length thread. “to realize what’s common / pause forthe count / and continuity / keep time,” begins the seventh section, “blackbirdsare common / in the thousands / mythical / about this femme’s feet [.]” Shespeaks of crows and through crows, setting all else to a foundation of corvidsacross spaces occupied and altered by human activity. Nicholson’s lyrics, hersmall points and moments, accumulate across great distances, holding eachmoment in relation.

Late Pleistoceneblackbird
families separated by glaciers
over fossil-rich chalkbeds
prior to human settlement
Northwesterners 

in the Pacific Northwest
mainly kept to coastlines
beaches and seafood
in particular whelks 

back then blackbirds
fashioning beads
onyx of perceptive eyes
abalone primer infeathers
early years alert toarrivals

Detailedand delicate, there is something of the lyric study approach in Nicholson’s CrowdSource comparable to American poet Lorine Niedecker’s own approach through LakeSuperior (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. As such, Crowd Source exists as a book-length poem fueled byresearch, observation and study, but propelled by language. “I am traffic,always looking to the sky,” Nicholson writes, as part of the sixth section, “bracedfor / aggression [.]” Or, two pages further, as she offers:

the nature of sources isto attribute citation
sources may form orsignify communities
wooded area intermittentcreek industrial
high-tech office parkpoles used for perching
trees: cottonwood, alter,yew, cedar, fir
in a riparian channelharbouring a deep V
inward, to the earth,through to old aquifers

first the waiting-for-kids-to-be-bornseason
fledglings fight to makeflight in the blue
whole as families unlikeour voided families
return each night to gatherin conference
learning the lay of theland likely close to
four or five before establishingor inheriting
relations in firm but opaquecommitments

Nicholsonarticulates relation and interrelation, offering the myriad ways in whichelements of the world connect together, held in place, at least here, inlanguage, from climate, capitalism and human occupation, all seen through thewisdom of crows. “one of the greatest spectacles / the city ever sees,” shewrites, to open the ninth section, “twice daily most seasons / dawn to dusk inlotic spectacle // quantum listening / with an innate sense of numbers // contourssensing a line / between the earth’s magnetic field // synthesized de novosurviving / billions of years as memories / stored in cells [.]” She writesblackbirds and grackles, crows and Vancouver’s SkyTrain, weaving quoted languageinto such meditative lengths as a kind of day book, riffing off moments andsources, crow activity and colonial impact. Or, as she writes to open the self-containedpoem “The Still,” set at the end of the tenth section:

descends into the heart
of its colonial name 

night grows dark as itdoes
and they are 

finally, the same colour
as the sky 

slightly orange

glinting, even asleep
they are 

wind chimes
and weather vanes