Kim Fahner : Re: Wild Her, by Shannon Webb-Campbell

Re: Wild Her, Shannon Webb-Campbell
Book*hug, 2025

 

 

 

The tides of Shannon Webb-Campbell’s last poetry collection, Lunar Tides, continue to ebb and flow in her new book, Re: Wild Her. Here is a poet who moves between worlds and dimensions, seeing through things as she journeys, searching for more knowledge, wisdom, and magic. It’s about swimming, too, which is something I love to do, so I understand how a swimmer’s entry into water worlds like ponds, rivers, lakes, and oceans can pull at you with a power that is equal to that of the moon at the tides. Webb-Campbell draws from her queer, Mi’kmaq, and settler identity, delving into the teachings of her Elders, but also using ancient tools of divination like the Tarot.

In her work, the poet subverts the traditional—and very patriarchal—understanding of what it is that witches do. They may be often referred to in traditional literature and lore as ‘crones,’ but Webb-Campbell upends the incorrect stereotype to uncover the truths of wise women and oracles. In doing so, she invites readers to dive into their own maternal bloodlines to explore their origins. She conjures ancient female power and channels it through her words—embodying the strength and fluidity of the Divine Feminine—so that her poetry becomes a portal through which readers are invited to explore their own inner depths.

The first poem of the collection, “Her Eros Revisited” sets the tone for an immersion into sensuality and a feminist reclamation of raw eroticism. Divided into parts, the poem moves from “a transatlantic flight over midnight” that “catapults us through moonlight,” to Paris. Once there, the speaker says, “I write long after Anais Nin/for a world that does not exist…I am now a sultry femme/a visionary sprit/who splits, sips, and swills.” Reading this sequence feels a bit like going on a pub crawl through a city you haven’t visited before—it asks you to enter the journey of exploration. The final piece is celebratory in tone: “reading E.E. Cummings’s erotic poems out loud/under covers we tangle like root vegetables/wrapped up in borrowed sheets.”

In “Sirens Off Capri,” the speaker transforms into a siren, “making love Calypso deep/in the underwater cavity.” There’s a sense of escapism here, too, in poems like “Transatlantique,” when the poet writes: “I want to become Transatlantique/drape my spirit in Barbier costume/tango between Halifax and Paris/flow in elaborate gowns/held up by whalebone corsets…swirl with womankind/rebellious godmothers who crossed the grey ocean” to break traditions and spend “their years living in surrealist motifs.” Re: Wild Her travels the world, touching down in a variety of places around the globe, so the notion of travel, of being transported and even transformed, is a theme that is very much central to the poems presented here.

The poet draws on both her Mi’kmaq and settler heritage, highlighting a series of female muses throughout the collection. In “Off Isla Mujeres (Bay of Women),” the speaker says: “kindreds comb beaches/for relics of fertility/swim in medicinal waters/before the Mayan moon goddess/we offer our feminine forms. Swimming is depicted as both a simple immersion into water but is also elevated to something sensual and sacred, something transformational. In “Seawater Portals,” there is a “womblike cave for healing/once ancient Mayan bathing rituals/a portal between the living and the dead.” There are references to selkies, and to the fish women who “emerge from the waters’ offering/after a trinity of swims all in one day/baptism by sea.”  and the speaker wonders, “what if my root system is stars?” There is also a recognition of how certain cultures are similar when, in “Ceremony Collaboration,” Webb-Campbell writes: “at this time of ecological crisis/look to Elders and Buddhists/wildflowers who know meditation.” The poet enters the natural world to highlight the beauty, and the sacred, but also to warn of what climate crisis is doing to the environment. The fluidity of the poetry in Re: Wild Her is also reflected in the way that the speaker immerses themselves in landscape. In “Nitap,” a poem for Douglas Walbourne-Gough, and referencing his book, Island, the speaker says: “you are made of rocky earth…you remind me I’m made of wind/wild like a partridgeberry/born of moose calls.” The final stanza of the poem speaks to the connections between the intertwined roles of human and environment: “in our kinship conversations/your voice fills me with island/a dialect that calls me back.”

Webb-Campbell continues to examine the way in which language is fluid, exploring how traditional language plays a role in her work and life. In the poem, “Pink Up Parched Earth”, which is on the left side of the book, a Mi’kmaw translation is on the opposite page, so you can see both as you read. The translation is by Joan Milliea, and does not follow the stanzaic structure of the English original. This reminds the reader that meanings can shift and transform between two languages, even if the central essence is common. It’s a reminder, in many ways, of how we should live in peace with one another, and how we should try to continue to work towards reconciliation in a collaborative way.

If you’ve read this far, I’ll say (openly) that I have been a fan of Webb-Campbell’s work for a while now. I was keenly waiting for this collection to be released, and it’s more of what I loved about the poems I read in Lunar Tides. If that book of poems examines love, loss, and grieving, then this one does more of that, but also extends its reach to encompass the journey from brokenness to healing. That change and healing process takes time—sometimes decades or centuries—but Re: Wild Her is hopeful and empowers the reader to work through their own broken parts, encourages them to journey both outwards and inwards, and allows for that fluidity of exploration that is part of a life well lived.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her newest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). Her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, will be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. She recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. As well, Kim was named as a finalist for the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She may be reached via her website at http://www.kimfahner.com

Amanda Earl : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Zoe Whittall

 

Zoe Whittall is a bestselling novelist and TV writer. Her novel The Best Kind of People was a finalist for the Giller prize and named Indigo’s #1 book of the year. The New York Times called her fourth novel The Spectacular “a highly readable testament to the strength of the maternal bond” and The Toronto Star called it “a singularly impressive piece of fiction.” She won a Lamda literary award for her second novel Holding Still for as Long as Possible, and the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie prize for her debut, Bottle Rocket Hearts. She won a Canadian Screen Award as part of the writing team for The Baroness Von Sketch Show. Her latest books are No Credit River (poetry/memoir), Wild Failure (short fiction), and The Fake (a novel). She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Zoe Whittall reads in Ottawa on Friday, March 28 as part of VERSeFest 2025.

Amanda Earl: In Ars Poetica, you mention that you read everything labelled autofiction, and you are drawn to autofiction as an alienated truth. You say it permits stories without villains. Were you consciously reading autofiction to try to figure out the rules or conventions? Can you talk about why the idea of an “alienated truth” was attractive or generative to you?

Zoe Whittall: I love autofiction mostly because I love style, voice, language, and character more than I like plot. I like a tightly plot driven TV show, I love a meandering thought bubble of a book. Give me a slim volume about a girl sitting in bed thinking about her philosophies or feelings and I’m all over it. But part of what I love about it is its implicit unreliability, and the sort of gossip-y or fake closeness of feeling as though you’re sitting beside the author when they’re at their weirdest and they’re telling you secrets. But no one is ever really telling you secrets. They’re offering you a sculpture, highly cultivated, polished and chipped away at, that only looks raw or like it has an organic, improvised quality. Every word, phrase, moment, in any good book is deliberate. If it was just blurted out and messy it would be like when you look at a bad painting but you don’t know why it's bad but you know it somehow. And the secret is that the composition is off balance. But I love the lie of autofiction. It feels close to what I like about the new narrative movement which was this raw, circular, rule-breaking literature that was often about sex and oblivion and queerness with these unwieldy and wild sentences that felt like you were just reading someone’s scrawled vulnerabilities. So alienated truth was the most concise way I felt I could describe what I think the best kind of hybrid, personal texts can aim for.

AE: Creative nonfiction and memoir have overlapping qualities. This book is described also as a memoir in prose poetry. Can you talk about your experiences in trying to label this work?

ZW: Ok so here is where I confess that I assumed creative non-fiction and memoir were one and the same? Is the difference that CNF can be more creative – i.e., loose with the facts and more story-like? It started as a book of mostly prose poems, and the more I worked on it the more I started to see a book length narrative arc. And then I started to think about the confessional element and how I might be able to be more overt about it.

AE: In your Ex-Puritan interview with Kailey Havelock about your novel The Best Kind of People, you write “I used to feel more comfortable in first person, and sometimes I still do.” Now you are using first person and writing something that is so clearly about personal experience. How did you get more comfortable with writing in first?

ZW: I feel comfortable in first and third for different reasons. Both have an intimacy that you can’t get with the other. Sustaining first for an entire novel is difficult in terms of the constraint of what you can know, but it is also roomy and had a depth you can’t always get in the same way with third. I like them both.

AE: This book is so readable, relatable, funny, biting, and raw with self-deprecating humour. As a comedy writer, I imagine you hone your craft for timing and knowing what is humorous for an audience. In the book, did you have to try to be humorous or is this just how you are? Can you edit humour or is it something that just has to flow naturally?

ZW: It's something that comes naturally to me whenever I’m wrestling with an idea or how to think about something. Certainly it’s a defense mechanism and also how I understand the world. I’ve also been working as a comedy writer for TV and crafting jokes while also writing books for about ten years now, so the instinct is hard to turn off. I definitely edit humor the same way I would any sentence, for rhythm and pay off and I think about how long a line is and whether or not the joke is too quick or too long.

AE: One of the areas of the book which impressed me was the constant engagement with its form, the metatextuality of it. You refer to it as a “book of ideas” (4) and “A poem is four hundred years of lesbian gossip” (10). You say that “form is content” (15). Content can be both the substance of a work and a state of mind. The form here troubles or queers the journal/memoir/poetic form by playing with it, such as you do in the prose pantoum (20) or by using techniques such as imagery and repetition which hybridizes prose and poetry. You mention Dodie Bellamy and the New Narrative and mention that you were inspired by it? Can you give some examples of how it inspired you? Did it help you tackle ways in which to approach an unreliable memoir, for example?

ZW: I was thinking about something Dodie Bellamy said in an interview about how the new narrative movement was big on telling not showing. I think that unlocked something in me while writing this book, to stop being afraid of defining the genre and being fixed in any which way. I was, am, very influenced by that worlde of mostly queer avant garde writers who were unafraid to break with the conventions of the time, who wrote about shame with humor, sexuality, and dying – very much influenced by aids and the conservatism of the 80s, I imagine. The kind of confessional zine era I started writing in, those movements were in conversation with each other. New narrative writers were so daring on the page with what looked like confession but was highly artful and audacious, using real names and real events, but twisting and subverting it all. I returned to Kathy Acker and Gary Indiana and Gail Scott while writing the book, I was looking for permission to really go wild after a few years of writing fairly conventional novels, form-wise.

AE: There are vivid details in the book. Is writing a journal or diary part of your everyday practice or something you did to work on this book?

ZW: I journalled obsessively in my younger years but I haven’t been consistent about it in a long time. So some of the details I’m looking back on are from photographs or are just particularly memorable, others start as a sensory detail from a journal and then I expand on them or make them more stark or interesting.

AE: What is it like to read the book to an audience? Are there certain parts that you don’t read or wish to avoid reading? Are you surprised at what people laugh at?

ZW: I mostly read from the ars poetica and any of the poems with humor because they work better out loud. Especially since I started writing for comedy shows and doing some stand-up, I’m most comfortable if I can make at least a few people in the audience laugh. There are certainly poems I don’t think would work from the stage.

AE: In some ways, the book could be a handbook for the broken-hearted, especially in its reference to transmasculine and femme butch relationships, which as you mention is rare. I love the idea of writing the book you wish to see in the world. I feel like this is a book I wish to see in the world, including the wisdom you share and its hybridity. I am grateful to you for sharing your grief, your heartbreak and your experiences as a writer. Do you think you will play with this unreliable memoir, prose poem format again? How does it compare to writing fiction for you?

ZW: Thank you! I will definitely write more prose poetry. I love the form. I love a long line and small stories pushing up against imagery and comedy and fragments. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be explicit about writing memoir again. Depends on what happens in my life, I suppose?

AE: Can you achieve an objective distance from your writing at the editing stage when you so closely write about grief and heartbreak?

ZW: I think so, or you can close to it. And then you have the gift of an objective editor who can remind you what is artful or what the interesting idea might be that you’re wrestling with, and then what is the diary stuff that can be cut to make the work better and real.

AE: You mention that your ex will hate the book but will never read it (51). Did you feel you had to be careful in how you depicted him in the book?

ZW: Yes. The book is about me and my grief process, I offer very few specific details about him and I did that on purpose bc it felt like the ethical thing to do. As a reader I love the gore of gossip and confession but as a writer I can’t help but always think of the real people I love and have loved and their feelings.

AE: “There’s the way I live and the way I want to live.” I feel like this could be a refrain for queer people and their lives, that feeling of having to fit into some concept of heteronormativity that is shoved down our throats through film, tv, etc. Do you find models for the way you want to live in art, literature and film and do they act as solace or reassurance? Today, given the rise of homophobia and transphobia and removal of rights, especially in the USA, do you feel like your work might help queer and trans people feel less alone?

ZW: I’m not sure. I’ve certainly heard from a lot of readers so far who have felt seen in terms of the specific kind of heartbreak devastation that can happen when you end a relationship with someone who was very push-and-pull emotionally, where you feel caught in a kind of addictive cycle. It’s a strange, surreal kind of dynamic, not quite like regular heartbreak or grief because there is an added feeling of such utter confusion for which way is up or down. The line about the way I live and the way I want to live was for me about the things you say and believe about who you are in relationship and how you’re getting by, and then the truth of those most sorrowful moments.

The rise of transphobia right now is so terrifying. I feel like I can’t even make sense of how bad it is getting every day. I feel like we have to prepare for war and I’m not being an hysterical leftist overstating harm, I really do feel like it’s a new era and I’m very scared.

AE: I appreciated your inclusion of the details of the literary life: awards, artist retreats, toxic CanLit, struggles to write, responses to fan mail, etc.

ZW: I couldn’t write about the last ten years of my life without mentioning the strangeness of life as a full time writer within this particular world of Can Lit. So many things happened all at once, and it was a very exciting time but in some ways any artist’s career has extreme ups and downs. It mirrored the relationship in a way. So there was chaos everywhere. And I dislike reading memoir by artists where they leave out the day to day practical details of being an artist.

AE: “I can’t choose safety as an artist…” (71) Did writing and publishing this work help you work through your grief and heartbreak and did it make you feel unsafe? How do you cope with such feelings?

ZW: I’m not sure if it helped me cope, but it did help to write a story of it all.

AE: “My feelings were so big I was stumbling through our life together, a messy chaos monster.” (51) I think a lot of people will relate to this book and I appreciate your sharing your stumbles. Thank you for writing no credit river and for being willing to be open about your experiences.

ZW: Thank you, Amanda! Looking forward to seeing you in Ottawa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a writer, editor, mentor, reviewer, publisher, living on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Hire her as an editor or literary event organizer. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a collection of near-death long poems. More info: AmandaEarl.com. Linktr.ee/AmandaEarl

Kim Fahner : Toxemia, by Christine McNair

Toxemia, Christine McNair
Bookhug, 2024

 

 

 

I’ve always admired Christine McNair’s poems, but I’ve been waiting curiously to read Toxemia for a while now. I keep an eye on which authors are releasing new books each year, so I saw this one coming a while ago, and pre-ordered it. When it arrived in the mail, I read it quickly, and then I read it again. There’s a lot that happens in Toxemia, and I wanted to do it justice by taking my time to think through the ideas that McNair presents.

If you’ve ever dealt with depression, you’ll find yourself nodding your head in agreement with the ways in which she describes that void. In “clever clogs,” McNair writes of how she managed the illusion of good health while working at a small press, creating a mirage for bosses and co-workers, but exhausted by that output of energy at the end of each day. That wears a person down over time. She captures it beautifully when she writes: “And anyways, hide it. Just hide it. Don’t tell. You know what happens when you tell.” Then, when it begins to collapse: “I fail. I fail. I fail. I consider pinning a note to the door and walking away. Just to save everyone the disappointment and allow quicker HR turnover.” She continues, writing, “It’s the loneliness. It’s the depression not quite corralled. It’s the interior aspect of intense…that falls into sharp planes. And I know it’s unreasonable. So, I control, I contain, I stay within the lines.//Until I can’t.” Those who have been there will nod their heads in agreement. They’ll recognize the place where it all crashes down.

The underlying current of depression in a person’s life is a theme that threads itself through Toxemia. McNair makes the reader think about how they might deal with insomnia, depression, anxiety, and then also think about layering in the added stress of physical health issues. Survivors of depression will recognize this dance, of trying not to catastrophize when dealing with chronic, physical health issues that are beyond your control. Too, weave in how women perceive and view their physical bodies—throughout the course of their lives—and you’ve got a problematic mix of physical and mental challenges. McNair considers the complexity of all these moving parts in Toxemia, which is why it’s a brilliant, complex, and thought-provoking book.

In the section titled “treatment,” there’s a poem titled “look,” where McNair writes about how depression is like a caul, and how “depression in the ancient world was cured with/bloodletting, baths, exercise, diet” and how treatment has supposedly changed since then, as “that membranous caul [is] still caught in eyelids.” In “loop,” the speaker says: “Mindfulness is vital. Mindfulness is crucial. I breathe through. I rage on the top of breath and on the under of breath. It latchkeys me to the moment that keeps me sane but it is also suffocating.” A diagnosis of depression often means that you need to learn to ‘manage it’ over the course of your lifetime, through medicine and therapy, along with mindfulness, while still consciously searching out and documenting the bright spots as you go through day-to-day routines.

The title of the collection, Toxemia, refers to an older medical term for today’s diagnosis of preeclampsia. It also made me, as a reader, think of how there are so many toxic elements to human lives, but particularly when you consider women’s health. When things fall apart with our physical health—and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—how do we manage, survive, and still flourish as we face chronic illness and disability? How do we face our own ableism in the face of a new disability, and how does that change the way in which we view (and live in) the world? How do we mind our mental health as our physical health becomes uncertain and increasingly problematic as we age? How do we tend to (and care for) our human selves when we’re caught up inside a frustratingly inhuman and often sexist and patriarchal medical system? So many questions, I know, and a lot of them unanswered, or answered dependent upon each person’s own experiences. Beyond all of this, what Toxemia did for me is that it made me reconsider how we—as women—define and redefine ourselves throughout the course of our lives.

McNair’s attention to craft and structure is evident throughout the collection, but one example of her keen and adept writerly ability comes in the sequence of nine poems titled “nesting dolls.” Images of the Russian matryoshka are conjured inside the reader’s mind, so that the fitting together of memory pieces makes perfect sense to a person’s search for identity and desire to document evolution over time. In this grouping of poems, McNair etches out specific memories—from a childhood trauma of being caught in an escalator, to remembrances of mental health issues as a teen, to problems in pregnancy, to a consideration of morality and legacy—so that the reader is left considering their own timeline, mapping out parallel events that lead from there to here, from then to now.

Later, near the end of the book, In “nesting doll” (now singular), McNair explores the way memory laces itself between generations of women, and how it shapeshifts in tricky ways, beginning with a sharp opening line: “I’ve been told my memories are not my own.” She then plums the depths of the power of story, writing: “I try to say—without the stories, there’s barely anything left of a person. Even if the stories aren’t entirely right, they breathe a bit of life into the flat images. Our memories are not our own. Your memories are not complete.” In each memory, in each photo that is fixed by a magnet to a fridge or taped to a wall, or posted on social media, we create a trail of story that moves from one generation to the next, and beyond.

In “nesting doll,” coming as it does near the close of the work, McNair perhaps alludes to her new understanding of her own identity as it has come to rise from family lineage and the passage of time.

Stylistically, McNair’s collection is a hybrid collage that weaves poetic memoir with black and white photographs—assorted images of historical documents and charts, medical settings, two children’s dresses, a clutch of garlic at the writer’s feet, a piece of fruit, a flower—that dovetail the text. This suits the fluidity of the text, in my mind, because the writing is so honest and raw that readers are offered glimpses into the writer’s point of view in documenting a life’s journey. It feels voyeuristic, at times, reading these fragments of someone’s life, as if you’re reading their diary and shouldn’t be doing so. It’s this draw inwards that is compelling, pulling the reader from piece to piece.

While questions of illness and mortality are present in Toxemia, there is also such a great sense of hope in the celebration of persistence, and of surviving of difficult things  It’s there in how the reader can eavesdrop on a choir singing inside a cathedral in “pacem,” and in the insistent voice of “get up,” and in “records,” when McNair writes of her husband, “And then we were we. He makes me laugh. I don’t laugh enough. Never was a kinder look. His eyes—his beautiful eyes.” Too, it is also in the “glow record” and legacy that McNair has created in her work here, for herself, and her loved ones, and perhaps especially for her children.

I suppose that’s what I loved most about this book: McNair writes of the pain and loss of control that comes with physical and mental health challenges, in how our bodies are frustrating animals (especially when we come to realize we have so very little control over them),  and still it is also about resilience, bravery, and the need to formulate connections through time and space, and in our current lives. So, Toxemia speaks to the hard-won values of persistence and survival—of managing life’s challenges—but it also rises to celebrate the tenacity of the blooming that arrives alongside the struggle. There’s such beauty in that revelation, and perhaps that it why this work is so gloriously more about growth and strength than about destruction or weakness. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, has just been published by Latitude 46 Publishing. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : Oh Witness Dey!, by Shani Mootoo

Oh Witness Dey!, Shani Mootoo
Book*hug, 2024

 

 

 

 

What I love about Shani Mootoo’s new poetry collection, Oh Witness Dey!, and what I loved about Cane / Fire  before it, is how Mootoo’s work is alive and breathing on the page. Her poems take up space, aren’t anchored to the traditional margins on a page, and spread out to raise their voices and make themselves heard. The craft, in all her poetry, is clear, and the great amount of thought and care that’s put into deciding where lines begin and end, and where they dance across the page—or even when the font changes in size—is poetic architecture of the highest order. In Oh Witness Dey!, Mootoo continues with her examination of colonial violence, speaking to the way newcomers migrating to various countries must always first encounter and learn to live within patriarchal and oppressive structures, but must also, at the same time, fight furiously against them. The energy that would take is exhausting just to even imagine.

In “We,” a long poetic sequence that sits almost as a centrepiece in the middle of the book, the poet explores family ancestry, recounting an encounter with a university professor who poses ignorantly framed questions about identity. The professor asks her student what it feels like to come from other places, and then cockily assumes that she already knows the answer, just based on her own academic research: “she advises/Regale us, rather, with tales of/Contemporary Indo-indenture despair/And the cut-out mother mother mother mother tongue.” The speaker thinks, “What am I, wherever I go, if not somebody’s/forever-victim/forever-coolie?” and then poses questions of her great-great grandfather: “did you walk? how? with verve? were you /running? from what? to what? at what speed? approximate for the sake/of story—were you, for instance, panting? looking over your shoulder?” Was his departure calm, or frantic? Prepared for, or unexpected? The speaker pleads, “talk to me even if I don’t understand—and then so I understand, in hindi, bhojpuri, hinglish, whatever, just talk, pepper—or haldi, as you wish—your/my origin story with aromas, how about some recipes? hardships, hardships overcome…” Through it all, the reader is left sharply aware that the professor hasn’t given the student the space to speak, but has spoken over them, in true colonial fashion. The voice that has been erased is that of the student, the person who has the actual lived experience, and who is searching to find more parts of themselves as someone who understands diaspora from the inside.

Another theme that weaves itself through the book is the racism that is inherent to the European systems of historical and systemic colonization of the world. Mootoo’s great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad from India by the British as indentured labourers. The poet herself was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and now lives in Southern Ontario. The idea of movement, of migration and the slave trade, as well, is a current in these poems. In “Brown Girl in the Ring,” the speaker says, “Two-timer I am, infatuated/With the country in which I love/Yet yearning always for the one I left behind//I scratch my head until/Inner sores weep,” and refers to the European explorers who sailed the ocean in search of ‘new worlds.’ Those worlds weren’t ‘new’ to the people who already lived there, and so weren’t available to be ‘discovered’ as they already existed.

In “The Nevertheless Queen,” the speaker refers to Spain’s Queen Isabella, as well as to the vicious damage that was done by the Inquisition and Catholicism. This wave of brutal colonization is full of “royal fanaticism and paranoia on steroids.” The damage that is done to Caribbean nations, under Isabella’s ruin, is obvious as the poet refers to “Isa dear” as the force behind “all those expulsions, your forced conversions/The Inquisition, the burnings/The centuries you spawned of/Caribbean poverty/Blood and killing.” This historical background, so multi-layered and complex, is beautifully conveyed in Mootoo’s work, with poems that stretch out and take up space to allow the poet to explore and convey the multiplicity of historical timelines, identities, and voices of those both dead and alive.

In “Being Here,” the poet addresses her role as a settler on Indigenous land, as well, noting that displaced people from other places have come to Canada, landing and settling on First Nations lands. The poet writes: “I, too, have settled here…I, too, had not asked, nor was permission granted/What is the weight of gratitude brandished/For what’s not given, but rather, taken.” The complexity of a migrant’s place in a historically colonized country is complex, and multi-layered. Mootoo alludes to treaties on ceded as well as unceded land, writing: “I endeavour to be forever cognizant of my complicated good fortune/not as uninvited guest, not as an admitted settler mea culpa-ing/nevertheless onward/but as one who stands in every way I can with Land’s protectors,/Water’s protectors…in the struggle against, a through line of past, of contemporary/injustices/against Land, her First inhabitants, all her descendants.” Colonizing empires that invaded and pillaged continents and countries around the world ended up shifting people from their Indigenous lands, and the ripple effect is felt on a global scale with waves of migration.

Oh Witness Dey! also touches on the ways in which humans have so thoughtlessly treated the environment. In “Cosmic,” the speaker talks about her friendships: “Global, I, my circles and friends, we surely are,” moving beyond specific geographic communities and regions because of access to long distance flights and the zoom of virtual technology. Further on in the poem, Mootoo refers to “the original globalization: empire expansion,” writing of various wars, as well as the downfalls of global travel. Global warming and the climate crisis are alluded to in “Wondrous Cold,” with a poem that touches on “Air pollution from wildfire smoke” and “The castles we have built:/Nuclear, biological, chemical.” Human greed to colonize and extract natural resources is addressed, too, when the poet writes of the “Decline in bee and bat biodiversity/Pandemics bioengineered,” and the “quench” for the “insatiable hunger” of capitalism that is big business around the globe.

This collection is rich in its content, as all of Mootoo’s poetry is, so it’s a thorough and rich immersion in overlapping voices and textures that requires the reader to read carefully and listen closely. One voice might ask a question or make a statement, while another might weave itself in to show—even in the way the poet structures and lays out her work on the page—that there is not one single way of witnessing the damage done by European explorers and monarchs as they made their way around the world. So many places of origin, so many people forcibly displaced by slavery and indentured labour, and all their voices seem to speak as you read these pieces. Readers need to listen, to not speak, and then they might hear what’s being said.

In some ways, it feels a bit heretical to try and review this collection because it is all about listening rather than speaking. The reader is asked to open their mind and heart, to thoughtfully consider the various strands of identity or origin, the many movements of people around the globe through history (mostly forced upon people and not undertaken by choice or free will), and to consider the role of witnesses. As readers, we become witnesses to the speakers in Mootoo’s poems, but we also become more aware of the ways in which our own settler ancestors behaved very, very poorly. Perhaps, in reckoning with our own ancestral histories, we become witnesses to the potential of how we can hope to work together make the world a more equitable place. Oh Witness Dey! calls its readers to think through our own family histories, to listen to our own voices and stories, and to ask questions of them so that we can examine ways in which to move forward in making the world a better, brighter place than it is right now.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : Lent, by Kate Cayley

Lent, Kate Cayley
Book*hug Press, 2023

 

 

 

 

Those readers with Catholic backgrounds will know that the season of Lent is about giving things up, about sacrificing pleasures and things that might be excessive. Given the time we’re living in, the poems in Kate Cayley’s Lent—including the title poem—ask the reader to consider their place in the often-shallow and superficial secular world. Here are poems where attention to detail is often referenced, with a suggested connection to repetition, in a way that echoes prayer. Cayley’s long prose poem, “Lent,” was the winner of the 2021 Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, so the common themes and questions that arise in the book include an emphasis of attention to detail—in terms of being aware of the world around you—to repetition, as well as to ideas of forgiveness, sacrifice, and praise all seem fitting.

The first poem in the collection, “Attention,” sets the thematic tone of Lent, beginning with an “And if” clause that leads to “then I will believe” statement that loops the poem into a framed reflection about how “repetition could itself be/a form of attention.” Beginning with “And if” signals to the reader that this will be a piece that continues an earlier conversation inside the poet’s mind—something that has been thought about and worried through to find itself on the page. In the following poem, “Ice Sheet,” a child’s sense of wonder draws the reader’s attention to the detail of an ice puddle on a walkway: “He is/secretive in his reverent/curiosity, face bent/out of my sight. The adult has missed the wonder and curiosity, busy in dealing with the demands of a hectic daily routine, but the boy is transfixed with noticing the tiniest of details when his boot shatters the fragile skin of the puddle.

Time, and its passage, also plays a thematic role in Cayley’s poems. In “Falling,” the poet considers her son’s growing independence as he gets older. Walking home from the store, she goes one way, and he goes the other, and she watches as her son disappears around the corner. In “Blue Houses,” an elderly woman dressed in “a housedress splotched with blue roses” shuffles outside, speaking Polish “in the direction of her neighbour, who doesn’t//answer.”  The poet forecasts the woman’s inevitable death, knowing that she herself is also becoming “an exemplar of something/vanishing.” Everything is temporary, and so the reader is reminded to pay attention to the beauty in life, to praise life itself.

Often, the reader will find themselves considering how the past so easily edges into the present and future, how humans are drawn to the art of the past as respite, and how we lament the environmental losses and crimes of our current century. In the face of horror, a judge at The Hague escapes the testimony of witnesses from the Bosnian war by telling someone “I look at the Vermeers,” knowing that their painted light will save him as he faces listening to remembered atrocities. In “Red-footed Tortoise, Science Centre,” the poet reflects on a tortoise that is trapped in a false rain forest, “The tortoise, glass-boxed,/heaves from corner to corner as if the earth/could be reduced to this. As if we could be forgiven.” In “Trying to Explain Time to Children,” too, Cayley opens the poem with: “You will not recognize it. It will feel ordinary,” continuing to ponder the ways in which we notice time’s movement as we get older.

Cayley’s poems about Assia Wevill (the partner of Ted Hughes who killed herself in the same manner as Sylvia Plath), Anne Sexton, and Mary Shelley, are stunning ones. In “Assia Wevill Considers Herself,” the poet channels Assia’s voice to say, hauntingly: “Nothing here is mine. I’ve used her leavings,/fitted my hands into her rubber gloves,/her relinquished scissors.//She knows that for me nothing worked/and this pleases her.” In “Glasses,” we find the disturbing poem about the American billionaire who purchased Anne Sexton’s glasses after her death, putting them in “a temperature-controlled case/like an artifact.” The poet asks: “Does he gloat over the glasses, think about the/woman in her car?” In “Mary Shelley at the End of her Life, Recalling the Monster,” Cayley takes on Shelley’s persona as she asks the monster to take tea with her, with them dancing together at the end of the poem. They find strange solace in being outcasts—she as a woman and the monster as a monster.  

The title poem ends the collection, underlining the thematic threads that work their way through Lent. There is so much here—in the final prose piece—and in the collection that speaks to the ideas of forgiveness, sacrifice, attention to detail, wonder, and curiosity. In our noticing the details, Cayley suggests—and in the repetition and mindfulness of our noticing—we praise what we’re a part of, and so enter a type of devotion and honouring that does not find itself in a church building, but rather in the connections we make with others in community.  

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com