Sadiqa de Meijer, In the Field

 

I lost my notebook.

            Thiswas, for a few days that summer, my distracted answer when people asked me how Iwas.

            Itclearly wasn’t a disaster, I wanted to convince myself, but my body seemed toargue; there was a void in my chest, and I couldn’t relax, repeating my searchesuntil they were senseless compulsions.

            Onlysome of that discomfort had to do with the possibility of exposure—that someone,anyone, might read my private scribblings. Sure, it was unsettling to imagineeye contact with that individual, to be so inwardly naked, but after thoseseconds of awkwardness, I would have my notebook back. The universe wouldresume its semblance of order. (“FOUND”)

 

The latest fromKingston poet (and current poet laureate for that city) Sadiqa de Meijer is thecollection of essays, In the Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press/AnstrutherBooks, 2025), a sharp reminder of just how good her award-winning alfabet/ alphabet: a memoir of a first language (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] was. You should pick up both books, really, to get a senseof how detailed, how precise, are her examinations of language and being; how,for her, the two are intertwined. The author of two prior full-length poetrycollections— Leaving Howe Island (Fernie BC: Oolichan Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and The Outer Wards (Montreal QC: SignalEditions/Vehicule Press, 2020) [see my review of such here]—there is such astriking way her first-person prose so quickly allows a reader, with ease andcomfort, into not only her own thinking and experience and complexities, but thatof the people she encounters, considers, reconsiders and reflects upon. Across ninepersonal essays, she composes fieldnotes for and through her own experiences,whether searching for a lost notebook, through medical studies, travelling to Amsterdam(the city where she was born), or working as part of a study of life through aparticular corner of Southwestern Ontario. As she writes in the essay “In theField”: “I was working for a professor named Kee. He knew the geology of thecity, where there were moraines and buried creeks. He told me that trees holdso many symbiotic bacteria that if their wood and leaves were somehow erased,they would still look like phantoms of themselves.”

 

It is the detailsthat occur through her thinking I’m struck by, offering moments almost asasides that provide the deepest meaning. “I imagine my objections areprincipled,” she writes of her medical studies, in the essay “Bloodwork,” “rootedin ethics and aesthetics, and then I doubt myself—because the hospital is acollective ruse, a place of faith in the reductive and separate, and I asurrounded by believers. My classmates sound eager to be in the building,mastering its workings, close to doing what doctors do. I begin to wonder if myaversion has other roots.” If reading helps teach us empathy, to understand another’sexperience from the inside, I can think of no better example than movingthrough this particular collection, as de Meijer provides a remarkable exampleon just how deep, and how detailed, the possibilities.