Kim Fahner : A Mudlarker’s Diary, by Ariel Gordon

A Mudlarker’s Diary, Ariel Gordon
Pinhole Poetry, 2026

 

 

 

Anyone who follows Ariel Gordon on social media (IG @janedayreader) will know that one of her passions in life is mudlarking. If you aren’t sure of what it is, mudlarking is something that started in 18^th century London, along the River Thames. Contemporary mudlarkers go out to the edges of rivers and sift through mud to find what lies beneath. Bits of bottle glass, pieces of china cups and saucers, cast off buttons, and shards of ceramics. In London, you need a permit to go mudlarking and you are not permitted to re-sell your finds. For Gordon, Winnipeg’s Red and Assiniboine Rivers are the places she most often goes to search out the past, often with other mudlarking poet friends who share her passion.

The poems in Gordon’s newly released chapbook, A Mudlarker’s Diary, document her riverside adventures from June to October 2023 and mark the river level of each visit to a shoreline. In the first poem, dated June 1, Gordon writes of “slip-n-slide footsteps” as she and fellow poet-mudlarker, Sally Ito, “chase geese/from beach to beach, yellow goslings herded/between black & white//goose & gander.” They move past encampments of unhoused people while Gordon discovers “the biggest chunk//of poison bottle I’ve ever found,/its blue glass sides studded w/ hobnails/& embossed along//one edge: NOT TO BE TAKEN.” Later, further along the shore, the poet finds the remnants of a dead fawn, “its speckled hide attended by flies,/not mauled but somehow folded/wrong.” Returning later that same year, Gordon finds that the carcass has gone, dragged off by some hungry creature.

Throughout the poems in this collection, Gordon refers to river pollution, referencing “Floating condoms, yes, but also ducks/w/ gasoline heads” and speaks of how the river has become “full of effluent,” a place where Winnipeg garbage has been dumped for generations. Despite the brightly coloured plastic tampon applicators and broken chunks “of red bike reflector,” Gordon is hopeful in her work. She writes of the birds and insects that live along the rivers, from “Black & white winged//grasshoppers, butterfly mimics” that “fling themselves into the air” to “hungry gulls,” a “yearling//deer, its back still spotted,” and a bird that “called beautiful warnings//all summer.” The poet walks near to “mobs of geese/& ducks,” birds that ignore her because she ignores them, with her “eyes fixed on my feet.”

This mudlarker poet converts “settler garbage, smashed status/symbols, into finds,” searching out the history of “an embossed medicine bottle” that was found “under a rock: John W. Bennie,//Dispensing Chemist, Polmont Station” to later discover that the pharmacy where it originated “was at a train station between Glasgow/& Edinburgh & dates it//back to the early 1900s.” This information, sussed out on the internet, has the poet thinking about “someone/tucking it in their luggage, next/to their immigration papers…”

After journeying through Gordon’s A Mudlarker’s Diary, a reader finds herself thinking of how humans have always created refuse, just from having lived in various spots. From ancient midden heaps dug up by archaeologists to these more recent finds documented by Gordon along the riverbanks in Winnipeg, we are here for such a short time but leave behind clues to our existence.

What’s also present in A Mudlarker’s Diary is an awareness of how social class is reflected in the refuse left behind by humans in the rivers and shorelines, but also highlights Gordon’s views of the landscape as she moves by inhabited and abandoned encampments while seeing the wealthier houses in the distance. This is not simply a poetic documentary of what’s been found during a series of mudlarking outings, bur rather a witnessing of what has been—and what is now—and a call to action to pay attention to both the landscape of the natural world and the people who have inhabited it.

The cover of A Mudlarker’s Diary is appropriately mud-coloured and some of the finds mentioned in the poems are visible inside the chapbook as drawings. These illustrations are taken from Gordon’s photographs of her mudlarked discoveries, and the delicate rice paper flyleaf features embossed finds that she stamped with ink. This is, to be sure, another fine chapbook released by Pinhole Poetry’s brilliant publisher, Erin Bedford, who’s curating an important body of Canadian poetic work in both her online journal and in this poetry chapbook press. All of these gorgeous chapbooks can be purchased online via Pinhole Poetry’s website.

 

 

 

 

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.