When it was confirmed that Stephanie Bolster was to be my thesis supervisor for my poetry MA, I wrote to rob mclennan to ask that he send me copies of all of her available chapbooks. I always like to read as much as possible of what my poetry mentors and colleagues have written—I call this my “oppo research,” which is ridiculous since I view hardly any of these poets as my opposition. And certainly not Stephanie, whom I asked to work with in my application and about whom I had heard only glowing reviews from her former students.
I knew that Stephanie was interested in zoos (it said so on her Concordia faculty profile and she had co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems, an essential anthology), but what I discovered in her Biodôme was a way of seeing, and thereby meeting, the animal world just as it should be met. In “The Arcades Project,” the chapbook’s opening poem, glass is “slanted, divided / by iron, shat at by pigeons.” The description is beautiful, but it’s not beautified. The pigeons have a subtle, surprising agency: they’re shitting at and not just on. Even here, in a poem mostly interested in Walter Benjamin’s mythic unfinished project and its Parisian subject, the life of non-human animals is impeccably rendered.
The collection gradually and methodically grows into its animal focus, moving from arcades to ruins to gardens, from pigeon to poodle to unnamed beasts, until we get to “Where the Bear Was,” the first incontrovertible “zoo poem.” This short poem set at a Parisian zoo takes us, in only sixteen lines and a drop title, from the 21st century to World War II and back, with a gut punch of a final line that elegantly encompasses all of history: “Once this was not even Paris.” And what is “Paris” to a bear? And what are “London, Chicago, Barcelona” to the paddocked giraffes of “Ubiquitous in This Domain”? As Stephanie handles both human and non-human concerns in her poems, we’re permitted to access the lives of both her speaker(s) and that which they see.
In the chapbook’s titular poem, we see tamarins plunging through light thickened by snow, and then we learn that the speaker is mourning someone who has died. “This is not the difference between life and imagination.” The poem’s penultimate line serves as a kind of summary of the project: the poems of Biodôme don’t mine the difference between life and imagination, they fuse life with imagination, allowing life and imagination to, if you’ll allow me, shit at one another. These are poems of beauty without beautification, poems of observation without beatification. Zoos (and humans) simply exist here, for better or often for worse, without the sanctification sometimes found in poems that deal with the so-called natural world.
When I was tasked with writing about a place for a PhD course taught by M.J. Thompson, I thought of the Biodôme, a place of childhood wonder and adult consternation, and with it I thought of course of Biodôme, a chapbook that confirmed for me how much I wanted to work with Stephanie Bolster. And how gratifying, how life-changing and life-affirming, how transformational her supervision has been. There are dozens and dozens of poetry collections that thank Stephanie in their acknowledgements, and each does so without routine or superficiality. It’s always clear how seen the poet has felt by Stephanie, how much of a positive effect Stephanie has had on the poet’s work. And that’s because Stephanie can see, and therefore meet, poets and their poems just where they need to be met.
I’m thrilled that rob is reprinting this phenomenal chapbook for its 20th anniversary, and I’m honoured that Stephanie allowed me to take the final line of “Biodôme” (“Even the briefest distance is divisible.”) as the starting line of my Biodôme chapbook. I’m sure that readers will find themselves as “rapt” as the speaker looking through daffodils in “Children’s Zoo, Central Park,” as pleasantly destabilized as the speaker is when they realize they hadn’t in fact seen daffodils, “it was too early for that or too late.”
Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of
Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has twice appeared in Best Canadian Poetry
and in journals across Canada. He is a student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary
PhD program. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, appeared with Brick Books in March 2026. Misha Solomon’s
Biodôme: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster (above/ground press, 2026) is
his third chapbook.
