Ribgrass, Poems, Nicole Mae
Peachpiles, 2026
I was intrigued to see Bronwen Wallace-shortlisted Saskatchewan poet Nicole Mae’s self-produced Ribgrass, Poems (Peachpiles, 2026), supported by SK Arts, and a title that apparently follows their prior full-length collections Youth (2018) and Screaming Sweet Nothings (2019). Opening with the short title poem, Ribgrass, Poems extends across eight sections of short poems and erasures—“SUMMER,” “AUTUMN,” “WINTER,” “SPRING,” “NYÁR,” “ÖSZ,” “TÉL” and “TAVASZ”—as Mae writes through first-person observational lyrics and the occasional erasure to articulate landscape and the body, including precise moments through heartbreak, misadventure, desire and chronic illness. Mae’s self-description in their author biography includes: “Their poems, films, and artworks reflect themes of nostalgia, longing, Hungarian diaspora, prairie queerness, ill body, shame, and romantic love.” As the title poem begins: “I stand in a pasture. / Dry winds scarf my throat. / Humid meadows / taste / knees. // Bend. / Dove sky / into olive grass.” There’s a delicate intimacy, a smallness, to the approach of Mae’s lyric, one attuned very close to the physical landscape of their southwest Saskatchewan. As the acknowledgments for the collection includes: “Ribgrass was created on Treaty 4 Territory—the land of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota Nations, as well as the Homeland of the Métis Nation. This work recognizes the deep relationship between land, water, and community, and it honours their enduring stewardship.”
Cloxacillin
I decided not to tell you
that I’ve started
antibiotics again.
I eat them with a runny
yolk, tinfoil potatoes,
and terror.
There are ways that Mae’s poems offer themselves as a loose sequence or assemblage of short lyric scenes, extending their way across the larger landscape of the full collection. Listen to the thread of the short poem “Fresh Cream Warm Cashmere,” that reads: “Every morning, / I put on a coconut and sandlalwood perfume. // I spritz my neck and both wrists, / then let it marinate into skin. // Wihin quiet moments, / I think of you. // I wonder if this fragfrance has travelled by wind / to your doorstep.” Working through memory and observation, these poems do offer themselves as the landscape of their narrator, from how the experience of geography can’t help but impact how one develops, reacts and thinks, and how illness can’t help but impact upon the landscape of the body. There is a looseness to this collection, and at times an unevenness, that might provide comparisons more to a day-book or poetic journal, over, say, a highly-crafted poetry collection. The poems exist in conversation with each other across a far larger structure, one might think, offering moments across this particular landscape, some clipped and exact, while others across a rougher ground, all the while attending that same quiet precision.
rob mclennan has a new poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press), as well as shiny new chapbooks through Subpress Collective and Broke Press. The late Gord Downie once recommended his second full-length collection, bury me deep in the green wood (ECW Press, 1999), so that was cool.
