At one point in the early 2000s, I realized that I could no longer remember when I’d last thought about animals in a meaningful way. A childhood in which I’d spent hours leafing through my parents’ massive natural history books and watching nature documentaries, and filmed Maxine the gibbon breaking my heart with her howls in the mists of the San Francisco Zoo (and repeatedly watched said film) had given way to a life in which I spent my time with poetry and visual art and thought dogs I passed on the street were cute. Where was the wonder I once felt in looking at a rhinoceros?
I applied for and was fortunate enough to receive a grant that permitted me to roam first-wave zoos in Western Europe, filling my first digital camera with hundreds, then thousands, of images. Farewell to rationing the number of shots; for the first time, I could take photographs as a stand-in for memory. Given five hours between trains to visit the Antwerp Zoo, where the narrator of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz navigates the Nocturama, when my time-rationing failed and I had an hour left to visit a third of the zoo, I photographed in lieu of seeing. This means of documenting my research – coupled with the fact that my husband, who found zoos depressing, opted to visit the cities themselves rather than the zoos, meant I was alone – led to a drifting, voyeuristic perspective in which I transformed into eye, an eye represented by my camera’s lens.
Having seen dozens of the world’s several hundred existing Przewalski’s horses in the space of a few weeks, I found the animals receded to specimens. The comparative perspective this repeated seeing induced meant I looked less at animals than at the spaces that housed them, thought less about the marvel that is a giraffe than about how the pattern of its hide resembled a certain cookie from my childhood. That I’d previously spent months in that nostalgic state of book-looking – though this time at photographs taken in zoos – meant that each enclosure I saw recalled not only the others I’d seen myself but those others I’d seen.
Twenty years after Biodôme was published, I recognize the golden period in which I wrote these poems – between finding stability in my adult professional life when I was hired to teach creative writing at Concordia in 2000 and becoming a parent in 2006 – as defined by my relationship not only to looking but to time. My “to do” list was largely empty, and yet the day’s minutes passed too quickly. The spaciousness of those days, as well as the paradoxical sense of urgency, manifests itself in the fragmentation of the poems, with their frequently stark and abrupt endings; the solitude, in the silences. To paraphrase, “Children’s Zoo, Central Park,” I felt at once too early and too late; everything was possible and everything had already happened. This haunted, haunting state continues to be my home in poetry.
A few years after Biodôme’s publication, I turned my attention to the devastation of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaches. I could say it was harder to look at these images than at the pygmy hippo gleaming in its tiled enclosure, but I always knew the line was fine; in “Ville de Nancy,” the “bawling spider monkeys” are a stanza away from “small photographs of bodies piled in Dresden.” The problem of the gaze – of who’s doing the looking and who’s being looked at – was always there, and since looking itself was the problem, it couldn’t be turned away from.
During the fifteen years I spent writing what would become Long Exposure, the book that arose from looking at Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl, and since, the only zoo I’ve visited has been in Granby, Québec, where my daughters prefer the Amazoo water park to the animal displays. It’s even harder now to really see the rhino, when everyone else wants to move on and I can’t get out of my own way enough to be where I am – and where am I anyway? What is wild, what is home? Shaboola, the female white rhinoceros, a fan favourite, who died at the zoo in the early hours of February 5, 2025, had entered the world 45 years earlier at the Toronto Zoo, the first white rhino born in Canada.
For years now, in a way that wasn’t the case then beyond livecams at various zoos, looking at animals online has been a common strategy for coping with the world. Cute cat videos have persisted as Moo Deng went viral and subsided. I’ve bonded with several of the writing students I’m fortunate enough to know over our shared love of weird creatures; one emailed me gleefully after he had seen Pacific spiny lumpsuckers, small fish that my brother and I thought as children resembled Chick-fil-a nuggets, for the first time. Now Rachael, an MA student whose creative writing thesis I supervised, is writing about teaching their cat to communicate through buttons. A rough day lightens when Misha – whose MA thesis I also supervised, whose PhD thesis I’m co-supervising, and whose own Biodôme brought me back to this one – sends me a photograph of his Shorkie, Mugcake, who resembles the disconsolate Hoboken-born penguin in my favourite Bugs Bunny cartoon.
When Misha and I first met on Zoom, he recognized the Smithsonian book Animal on the shelf behind me. I’d forgotten it was there. We’d both spent hours leafing through its pages, at markedly different points in our lives. We soon discovered we shared a fascination with the Biodôme, the Montréal ecological attraction that is at once conservatory, zoo, aquarium, and Museum of Natural History. A few years later, in the fall of 2025, he proposed a Biodôme project of his own, which might, if things came together (as they have, thanks to the marvellous creature who is rob mclennan), appear as a chapbook alongside (if I were were interested; if rob were willing) a 20th anniversary reissue of my Biodôme. Thanks to this generous invitation, I’ve re-entered these spaces, re-met these creatures, through Misha’s poems and my own, the latter of which I haven’t outgrown as much as I thought I had.
Misha’s poems are quicker and more complete than mine, his speakers – human or animal – funnier and more performative. His capybara speaks of being “the star / of the gift shop,” in an era in which strange mammals that have always fascinated me are readily available as toys in spots from the Jellycat website to Dollarama. My capybara – who never made it into Biodôme but haunts my imagination – is a near-mythic figure from my childhood, devoured by piranhas in the Amazon in a National Geographic documentary; afterwards, the bones floated to the surface. I didn’t see a capybara until adulthood; no one in my life outside my family knew what a capybara was. Misha and I both recognize how easily the animal, once seen (and how much easier to see it when it’s captive), becomes a commodity, a surrogate for itself.
Or a surrogate for us. Rereading my Biodôme through the lens of Misha’s Biodôme is humbling not only because his poems, written in an era when “research-creation” is an established artistic and academic practice and not just an obsessive thing some writers do, are smarter and even more self-aware than mine, but because, as much as we try to understand the other, we’re ultimately both exemplifying the speaker of Seamus Heaney’s “Personal Helicon,” the final lines of which captivated me at sixteen when I first began to see myself as a poet: “I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” Misha’s capybara rhymes that way – even signing off its poem with a wonkily clever slant rhyme – because Misha does. As for the actual capybara, who knows. The dome encloses the viewer as well as the viewed. We choose to visit.
Misha and I are both intrigued by the repurposed nature of the Biodôme, originally the Velodrome, the site of cycling and judo competitions in the ’76 Olympics. We both like the first zone, the Tropical Rainforest, best, for its distance from our lives and daily setting. I’ve been looking for the sloth in the scenery since Queen Elizabeth II opened the Amazon Gallery at the Vancouver Aquarium, to which we maintained a family membership throughout my childhood and early teens, in 1983. The weirder and/or scarcer the creature, the greater the appeal.
As the governments of certain nations withdraw from climate accords, the list of marvellous creatures that comprises the poem “A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth” transforms into “Litany,” a list of extinct species assembled into a poem by my late friend Elise Partridge, who, when I wrote the poem, was alive and well. Another poet friend lost to cancer, Diana Brebner, whose death quietly haunts my poem “Biodôme,” has now been gone for 25 years. Like distance, time is infinitely divisible.
I haven’t been to the Biodôme in close to a decade. Although my elder daughter could once recognize okapis and many other thrillingly specific mammals and their names due to the hours I’d spent reading Jan Brett’s On Noah’s Ark with her, neither she nor her younger sister particularly enjoyed visiting this indoor “attraction” they found bleak and blah, overcast and colourless, lacking the pace, theming, and merch of Disney World.
My kids aren’t me, the capybara isn’t me or Misha, Misha’s Biodôme and mine, his Biodôme and mine, differ. We’re each unique and alone. While I always intended the ironies with which “Housing the Greak Auk,” the last poem in my Biodôme, ends – “We were a marvel” – the legacy of imperialism has become that much more visible, widely recognized, and understood as ongoing, during the past decades. My looking is, I realize increasingly, part of this legacy. What can I do with that challenge but look at it, and look again?
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Stephanie Bolster’s latest book of poetry, Long Exposure, appeared with Palimpsest Press in fall 2025. Excerpts from the book were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2019. Bolster’s first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award and was translated into French as Pierre Blanche. Her poems have also been translated into Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby, BC. She has been a professor of creative writing at Concordia University since 2000 and lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec, on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti.
