Most of the poetry I write involves playing with other people's words–rewriting the statements of Trump administration officials into modified Spencerian stanzas, or using chunks of Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers to explore how books get recontextualized over time, or suturing quotations from dozens of different poets into a single poem. It tends to be playful and cerebral. Not much of it is personal.
The poems in a burrow, a nest, a lea stone (above/ground press, 2025), in contrast, as well as those in my previous chapbook, Microchimaera (Baseline Press, 2024), are almost painfully personal to me. I started writing them around 2003, when my wife and I first began the adoption and fostering process, and I continued with them over the next fifteen years that we were involved with Family and Children's Services. During that time we became parents to a foster child, two adoptive children, and a birth child. I was involved in teaching a training course for people who were looking to become foster or adoptive parents. My wife and I also founded a week of summer camp, which we still run, for foster and adoptive families. All of which found its way into these poems.
I never submitted any of this material for publication though, not at the time, because more than a few of the poems were critical of the child welfare system, and almost all of them addressed the difficulties involved in parenting children with trauma. I was worried that Family and Children's Services would become aware of them and be less inclined to place children with us. It was unlikely, I knew, but I felt that the potential consequences made even a slight risk unjustifiable. So I held on to the poems. Treasured them up.
When at last we made the difficult decision not to parent more children, when we were at last done with the child protection system, it felt like the closure of a significant period in our life as a family. Returning to the poems I had written over those years and forming them into a collection of some kind seemed like a way to process what that period in my life had meant for me.
The result, with varying degrees of input from people like Jim Johnstone, Shane Neilson, A.F. Moritz, Roxanna Bennett, and others, has become organized into three distinct groupings–a suite of short poems that was published as Microchimaera and has since been restructured into a sonnet crown; a long poem that relates the inciting experience behind my wife and I deciding to pursue adoption; and a series of poems in couplets exploring imagery associated with adoption, which became a burrow, a nest, a lea stone.
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Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press and The Porcupine's Quill, small press literary publishers based in Guelph, Ontario. He has written several books, chapbooks, and broadsheets, most recently Microchimaera (Baseline Press, 2024), winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award. His writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, ARC Poetry, CNQ, CV2, EVENT Magazine, filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, and The Puritan.
