What Is Broken Binds Us,
Lorne Daniel
University of Calgary Press, 2025
Lorne Daniel’s new collection, What Is Broken Binds Us, explores the spaces and places where things have broken. The wounds of loss are painful, of course, but offer places of learning and expansion. There is an allusion to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, when the cracks of broken items are mended with gold. In the mending, in the place where the gold joins things back together, there is a newly forged strength.
In “The Breaks,” which documents a bicycle accident, the speaker writes of how they hover above their broken body: “I am him. He is here. Someone/else/gone.” There is an “ambulance, a jarring ride, the bowl/of my body not holding. Sacrum./Sacred bone. Holy bone.” This is followed by a conversation with a surgeon who speaks of “Reduction. Fixation. Being fixed, repaired, becoming/fixated.” Afterwards, in “Sing Vibratos of Light,” the speaker “lifts and steps the rubber-footed/walker down hollow corridors, a new wing.” His “only worry now that he must return//to the familiar before he is missed.” He must rush to heal before the world moves on without him, not caring that physical and emotional healing takes the time it takes. Beginning with physical breaks is a certain place to begin, but the poems then shift towards larger, more philosophical considerations.
In What Is Broken Binds Us, the poet traces the history of his family origins in poems like “When the Tributaries Ran Rich,” “Tack, Harness, Lash,” and “Lang may yer lum reek.” In “Ways to Find Family in a Forest,” Daniel traces the migration of a 14-year-old ancestor, Constance Hopkins, coming to realize that “I am one of 75,000 (give or take) descendants/of Constance, who bore 11 children, lived to 72./We 75,000 tracked across this continent and beyond.” The poet does not avoid his family’s less comfortable history, beginning to write about slavery and property ownership in “Approaching Magnolia.”
In the poem, “In the Family Name,” Daniel broaches a darker side of his family tree: “Stories, grief, celebration. Distance, absence, loss. Where to start,/as a Daniel bearing the name of an English/enslaver, where to even begin?” There, in South Carolina, on a tour, “a descendant/of enslaved people talks...[of] Back-breaking/cotton-picking, blood-sucking disease-carrying/mosquitos, lashings, hunger, fear, the danger of the wrong/eye contact.” There, too, the poet comes to grips with the fact that “This is where our people came from./Where they were comfortable.” In “Fugue and Spiritual,” siblings walk in the place where ancestors once enslaved people. The poet asks, “How did the ancestors, my/kin, enslave?” and wonders how they might have done such a thing “in favour of iron/ implements, paper money.” The recognition of a family’s dark history is something that causes sorrow lay “heavy here/in wills and deeds, in the bloodline. Embodied.” The stories of the past, horrific, time travel to 2015, “tempo and tone/playing out now.”
More personal poems also populate the collection, with the speaker referring to a broken familial relationship—one between parents and son. In “Fluency (First Loss),” a child begins to explore language, but chooses to speak to his father on a Fisher Price phone rather than on a real one. The final stanza of the poem foreshadows a later departure as the child “swings/from story into song.” As he continues speaking, “his voices rises and rises/until with one high note he slips away.” In “Play Bonded,” the boy moves from 4 to 14, becoming more isolated as he listens to music through headphones, “blinkered under hoodie,” becomes “Here not here.” Then, in the poetic sequence titled, “Episodic Tremor and Slip,” Daniel heartbreakingly documents the ways in which an adult child can slip into worlds of addiction and mental illness, painting a picture of how parents can try their best to be supportive, but not always successful in saving a person who does not want to be saved.
In “You Don’t Get Here Without,” the poet writes “People don’t send cards” to mourn “the anniversary/of an estrangement” and reminds the reader that “It takes at least two to be estranged.” What Daniel does here, in addressing familial estrangement, is shed light on something that is often hidden or avoided. The longer humans live, it seems, the more chance there might be of estrangement of some sort. It’s refreshing to see it written about in such an honest and vulnerable way as it might perhaps encourage others to speak of their own estrangements without fear of stigma or judgement.
Loss is also something most North Americans tend to avoid. The last section of Lorne Daniel’s What is Broken Binds Us returns to the earlier poems of physical brokenness. In “To Carry an Absence,” he writes, wisely: “To carry an absence, learn to lean/a little, not so anyone might notice, but just/to feel a certain balance shift.” Daniel has his reader shift towards thoughts of physicality and mortality, reminding them of how brief a human lifetime is so that his poems encourage them to take note of how we can take appreciate and value broken things to better live more fully during the time we’re given.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.
