I was in Toronto recently, walking in Leslieville (feeling lost, despite all my apps), when I heard church bells. I looked up for a steeple, only to find the sound was coming from an electric car accelerating at the intersection. The car sound was the church bell. I stopped mid-sidewalk, struck by the oddity, and opened my notes app to write the moment down. The objects—the car, motor, my memory of bell-sound, me in Leslieville—briefly pulled toward one another in a slidey, synergistic way. I love how my brain was tricked.
In her introduction to Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson writes of Stesichorus, a poet of Greek Antiquity whose poems “released being” from Homer’s adjectives used as “latches of being.” In his poetry, Stesichorus undid these latches, “sending the substances in the world…floating up.” When meaning is released, it becomes defamiliarized. A kind of trickery happens: the electric car is the church bell is the motor is the liturgical tradition is the omen of climate change. Everything molts and reassigns. It’s this surprise, this slip of objects and moments, that pulls me into writing poetry.
My series poem “The Unknotter” in The Unknotter chapbook came from a Riddle Fence callout for pieces about “Knots, Nets, and Ties that Bind.” I was developing my creative master’s thesis at Memorial University—a poetry manuscript with the working title Tongues and Interpretation—and unpacking stories from my childhood: the folkloric tales of my Nan, the religious imagery of the church. Nan blended stories of angel visitations with fairy changelings, making the veil between biblical instruction and Newfoundland superstition very thin. My childhood was also full of hunting, fishing, and berrypicking in rural Newfoundland. Many of the poems in the chapbook address this: “Spilling Suns” speaks, in part, to the 90s cod moratorium; “Moose Tongue and Heart in Partridgeberry Syrup” meditates on the muscle memory of moose and my father’s recipes; “Fascia” is about a young girl trying to stay wild while being forced to wear dresses and pantyhose; “Fire on the Lake” and “Black Island Hymn” are poems of appreciation for my father, who taught me that you can row your way home in the pitch dark and warm up on the surface of the ice.
The Riddle Fence call brought to mind the years my family spent cod fishing in the Bay of Exploits and the times our hook got stuck on the sea bed—latched onto basalt rock, or hooked onto coral or brainy holdfast on the ocean floor. There were always tangles of line on the boat’s fiberglass floor, either from hauling in the line too fast or releasing the reel too quickly on a tight line, causing a kickback that made a nest of knots. I loved the challenge of untangling. I resisted cutting the line.
Initially, the rough draft of “The Unknotter” was a pages-long, narrative poem that outlined this experience, with sections like:
I am the unknotter, detangler
of fishing line on this August
day afloat on the Bay
of Exploits, surrounded by a smattering
of small islands: Pigeon Islands, Little Berry Island.
I was meeting regularly with fellow student, Mercy Williams, and supervisor, Dr. Michelle Porter, to share and discuss poetry. It was Dr. Porter who encouraged me to disassemble this poem and reassemble it using the overlapping images of folklore, religion, and rural life—playing with the images to see what new connections might be revealed.
The images slipped toward one another:
My father afloat
on the bay exploits,
all around us
a jumble
Pigeon (Island)
Little Berry (Island)
Tinker (Island)
whale exhale like
raptured souls
releasing all around us
Sections like:
perhaps I can prove to
father
what mettle I am made of
and he will be glad we
saved the line
perhaps he will know
finally and deeper,
that
I am his
became:
unravelling on the boat
floor,
perhaps father will see
what mettle I am made of,
perhaps he’ll be glad we
saved the line
he marvels
at my faith in
unknotting,
detangling
yet darkness surfaces,
spills across his face
like black tide
an ancient codex
I cannot read
I imagine doorposts
slathered in blood
pray the shadow passes
but it passes into me
What emerged were echoes of family line and ancient narratives, bringing an almost biblical weight to a summer day. Earlier drafts didn’t yet “unlatch” these moments—they stayed anchored to a linear narrative. By reassembling, remaining curious, and experimenting at the level of the line, I experienced that sought-after trickery and slidiness I felt in Toronto. This is not a stylistic experiment but a poetic practice—an undoing of latches, a noticing of what has been fastened, a question: what can be released?
Christina Wells (she/her) is a multi-genre writer from Northern Arm, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). Her award-winning work has appeared in The New Quarterly, ROOM, Riddle Fence, Horseshoe Magazine, Newfoundland Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Yolk. Recently, she began working with Amadeus Choir's Creative Choral Lab, working with emerging composers to set her poetry to music. She's also managing editor at Paragon and an English PhD student at Memorial University. She lives in St. John's with her beautifully unruly family and long-suffering dog, Bowen.