Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee
Coach House Books, 2026
North Vancouver poet, teacher and scriptwriter Meghan Kemp-Gee’s second full-length poetry collection, following The Animal in the Room (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023), as well as a handful of chapbooks, is Nebulas (Coach House Books, 2026), a collection she describes in her 2023 interview at Touch the Donkey as “a big manuscript” “about astronomy and afterlives.” At roughly one hundred and twenty pages, this is a hefty collection, held as a single book-length structure of individual poems, from prose poems to sonnets to more open lyric structures. There’s a silence that stretches across these pages, or perhaps, more specifically, a kind of hush, composing a meditative, exploratory lyric field guide of constellations and landscapes, climate change and human activity, and a study of nebulas within the Covid-era. “They lifted the mask mandates. I wonder,” she writes, to open the poem “THE WITCH HEAD NEBULA IS EIGHTY-FIVE / THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN / TRILLION KILOMETRES AWAY,” “nebulae or nebulas – which one sounds / better. We all catch coughs. Is this enough, / I’m asking. And I could start with colour, / double cheekbones, awesome sockets, open / mouth screaming east toward Deep Cove, our lungs’ / open books, the supergiant smiling / at your feet.” There’s an intimacy, and the slightest anxiety, to the quietude of her lyrics, asking fundamental questions and seeking grounding even within the furthest reaches. One might suggest the earliest human questions around self, creation and being came from attempting to comprehend what one saw in the heavens, and connecting it back to what might feel otherwise like the smallness of our lives, and general human purpose. “Who knows / what grows from those mouths,” ends the poem “AN ASTROPHYSICS LESSON FROM THE SNAKE NEBULA, / SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY LIGHT-YEARS AWAY,” “these mouths, just out / of sight on moonless nights, hiding out / from low humidity. Who dares speak / of the glorious spores and soaring / toadstools that might sprout under our forked / tongues on nights like these. Who is to say / which of us came first and who sees what.”
She composes poems such as “JUPITER MAKES ITS CLOSEST APPROACH TO EARTH / IN FIFTY-NINE YEARS, SEPTEMBER 2022,” but, on the following page, provides a lyric closer to the ground, writing “YO-YO MA PLAYS SIX UNACCOMPANIED CELLO / SUITES IN THE PINE CONE NEBULA, TWENTY-SEVEN / HUNDRED LIGHT-YEARS AWAY,” the opening sentence of such, with accompanying line breaks, reads: “If you could make your seat inside each opening note like / an open door an open mouth, / if you could make a sound the size of a nebula a keyhole / like a throat, / magnifying and applying, here you come, // I believe the resulting groan would blow the locks / off every one of the world’s doors, / unscrew the doors themselves from their / frames and jambs, / magnifying and applying.” One could describe this as a book about nebulas; a book of unanswerable questions, or simply a book about feeling adrift, and, looking up.
LIONS GATE HOSPITAL IS
ACROSS THE STREET,
JANUARY 2022
Six months later, the
heat wave sends in three
unprecedented winter
storms. After
the strangeness, the
snaps, the deepest snowfall,
the morning traffic’s body
prone, pinned down,
struggling to breathe,
house cats watch salted
side streets from the eighth
floor. The stuffed sky stills,
stuns them, us, like so
much heat. Our eyes grow
wide, our shoulders hunch
and heave, twitch-lipped teeth
chirping at something
real, or not. Like you
see some feathered not-nothing
I can’t see.
What do you know that I don’t?
say there are
birds out there, small
bodies like birds just out
of sight, like there were
ghosts out in the snow.
It is interesting to think of “nebulas” as the core around which her poems swirl, held as a similar anchor to how she wrote animals in her debut; she writes a foundation for her poems, thus, to touch upon and swirl around, seeing the structure for the larger manuscript. Her poems can theoretically move anywhere and everywhere, returning as they do to that central image. And yet, a poem such as “I STAY UP TOO LATE STUDYING IN FREDERICTON, / NEW BRUNSWICK, FIFTY-FIVE HUNDRED AND / SIXTY-THREE KILOMETRES AWAY” suggests the distances she writes are elsewhere entirely. While, certainly, this is a poetry collection built about and around distances and seeking connection through a lyric study of nebulas, this might simultaneously be a book about something else entirely, as are the best poems, the best collection. Listen, as the poem writes:
They say you shouldn’t ever
work in bed.
I’m reading the sonnets,
you know the ones
will we or won’t we,
clouded treelines full
of I’s and eyes and
nothing like the sun.
You shouldn’t make the
wrong comparisons,
but for you I’d make
exceptions. I’d make
too many – exceptions,
comparisons,
and clouds and clots of
earth, your eyes,
my thousand million
nebulas nothing
like themselves. I’d to too
many things they
say you shouldn’t, make
too much of the eighth
floor, two- and one-ness,
thirty-seven earth-
years, landscapes full of
time zones, five heartbeats,
and the two of us talking
in our sleep.
rob mclennan’s latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). It is very good.
