Kim Fahner : Gay Girl Prayers, by Emily Austin

Gay Girl Prayers, Emily Austin
Brick Books, 2024

 

 

 

Emily Austin offers her debut collection of poems, Gay Girl Prayers, as a series of subverted prayers and biblical stories, upending things to spin them inside out from a queer, feminist perspective. In “Deuteronomy 32:18 & John 6:35,” the flip of gender is purposeful, and presented early in the collection, as the poet writes: “You were created in the image of God--/man and woman, God created you/so, man and woman God must be.” In “Words of Consecration,” she writes: “Don’t take this, any of you, and eat it—/this is her body.//Don’t take this, any of you, and drink it—/this is her blood, which pumps for its own ends.” Catholics, active and lapsed, will recognize the phrases as part of the Mass, when the priest blesses the host before communion.

The poem that sets the tone for the book is “Genesis 37,” conjuring witchy wisdom in its lines: “Shall we resurrect, strange women?/Rise like steam, like birds from a subway station?/Defy the convention of the proverbs?/Write with our fingers?/I am.” The best way to do this, as Austin demonstrates, is to upend seminal Catholic prayers and memorized mantras. Readers will see this in poems like “The Virgin Jeff,” which begins “Hail Jeff,/blessed are thou among men,” and in “Hey Mamma,” which begins: “Hey Mama/who art in a lesbian bar,/hallowed be thy yearning” and ends with “Lead us not into bigoted churches,/deliver us from conservative politicians.” The second last poem in Gay Girl Prayers is “Joy to the World,” which subverts the Christmas hymn of the same name and reappropriates it from a queer perspective: “Do you hear what I hear?/Heaven and Nature are singing/they’re drag queens/they’re harmonizing/queer joy to the world/while two men slow dance.”

Austin’s quick, dry wit is evident throughout her poems as she uses her voice to highlight and expose the injustices that have been done by the Catholic church to women since the beginning of time. She uses the architecture of biblical verses and parts of the Mass, but then repopulates the traditional religious language with poetry that empowers girls and women. As a queer poet, Austin alludes to feminist, queer, and trans women, raising a rallying call that challenges the oppressive and patriarchal dogma of the church by forcing it to look to itself to discover and recognize its own sins.

A number of poems that refer to the infamous vestal virgins thread themselves through the collection, offering the reader places to land and gathering pieces of the collection together. “Matthew 25:1” is: “Heaven is ten girls/who take their lamps/to one another’s bed chambers/to light their rooms/until they sleep,” and then “Matthew 25:2” follows a bit later with “Heaven is ten girls/who take their lamps/to one another’s bed chambers/to read lesbian erotica/and make out.” The sequencing of the successive Matthew poems continues, and the subversion intensifies along the way. This series of poems is a bit reminiscent of a series of Russian nesting dolls, in many ways, and often left me wanting to skip ahead curiously to the next poem in the sequence to see how the image and symbolism would remake itself over and over again in a new and innovative way.

Austin’s wit is quick, acerbic, and pointed to specifically splice the various patriarchal and colonial organizations that would oppress women. In “Matthew 1:18,” she writes: “If you are ever forced to conceive of anything,/by a condom or a government that fails you,/by a Tinder date who ghosts you,/by God, your father, or by some unholy spirit,/let it be that you are important and good, like Mary/but with more choice.” In “At Calvary,” a poem about being oneself, about coming out in the midst of a non-supportive family, the speaker says: “She’ll climb on her cross at Easter dinner/while her homophobic uncle serves sour wine,” and “She’ll say, “Mom, they know what they’re doing,” alluding to the crucifixion. In this re-writing and re-imagining, the story takes a resurrective turn, so that the speaker will “rise from her chair,/contemplate going through hell to forgive them,/ascend to the room she prepared for herself,/and find peace in the miracle of her life.” Here is a poem that speaks of stepping into self, of speaking up clearly, and of reclaiming truth and identity in opposition to any organizational structure that is oppressive and misogynistic.

What Emily Austin does in Gay Girl Prayers is brilliantly clever as she revises traditional pieces of prayer that were fashioned by an archaic religious structure and turns them on their heads, transforming them into hymns of resilience and celebration for queer, feminist, and trans women. The result is a grouping of poems that will make you laugh out loud as you read, but also make you well aware of the careful poetic crafting of artful subversion that’s taking place in front of you on the page. Gay Girl Prayers fashions a new kind of poetic dogma that speaks of struggle, survival, empowerment, self-love, and of feminist solidarity in a way that is inclusive and spirited.

 

 

 

 

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

Kim Fahner : In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, Renée M. Sgroi

In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, Renée M. Sgroi
Guernica, 2024

 

 

 

Renée M. Sgroi’s second book of poetry, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, plants itself (pun intended) in the space of a small vegetable garden. In the collection’s first poem, “systema,” Sgroi plays with form and draws a connection between language and plants. We read printed words on a page from left to right in English, and recognize the form of sentences and paragraphs—or lines and stanzas—so the poet compares the way in which “a book//sifts pages, weeds out loosestrife   ,  phragmites/ploughs fields like oxen.” The poet ploughs the fields, chooses where to plant the images and how to structure the piece. Then, in the first version of Sgroi’s “morphology” poems,  the piece takes on the shape of a box on the page, summoning up the concrete, visual image of a field in the reader’s mind, and the word choices that map out the space conjure the essences of colour, texture, scent, and taste. The reader, then, is left to consider what might fill in the empty white space of the middle, perhaps suggesting the space of the garden plot as a metaphor for life, even.

One particularly fascinating aspect of these poems is the way in which the various parts of the natural world and environment take on sentience through voice. In “earth,” the land chastises humans as the poet writes: “how you bulldozed me, ripped//me of flesh/inside   in   out, tied…bruises beneath bark, lies seeding the saltiness of oceans//my protuberances you chopped/math-like.” The voice goes on to intensify the litany of sins, speaking of how humans have been “reaping my fecundity//settling city after/city,” with “subway turnstiles/like animals, toxic/mix of methane and atmosphere.” In “Sciuris carolinensis,” which is the Latin phrase for ‘squirrel,’ the squirrel’s voice pleads “bury me under heavy snow and not by the road: I too/have seen my likeness flattened there, decaying, or bury/me beneath a tree, tall limb to my shortened appendages” and then finally ends by saying, “but do not bury me within the old growth forest thinking/you have blessed me with my habitat, for you will one day/raze that space to pour concrete and my body, like yours,/is meant for scavenging worms.” These poems give the various aspects and creatures of the natural world agency, all while reminding readers that they have a responsibility to think before acting senselessly when it comes to the fate and future of the environment in their own respective towns and cities.

The poems in In a Tension of Leaves and Binding are also about the passing of time, seasons, and of loss. In a poem like “apple trees in late winter as if angry,” Sgroi writes of blossoms that “eventually fall,” and branches that look “like wizened Medusas” when they bear snow. In the poem, “in metamorphosis,” too, the first line continues from the title to read “the Buddha says everything changes.” Yes, everything in the natural world is cyclical, and this theme is constant throughout the book. In “preparing to overwinter,” the speaker begins with: “after you died, they sent a bouquet//pink and white flowers with a bow/lilies, large stargazers” and ends with images of the same bouquet, before winter snow, being composted, “tossed on dead remains of garden/yellowed tomato stalks, blackened leaves of basil.” As the wilted petals return to the cold earth, the mourners “mulched/the petals in wet soil/returning a part of you/to earth.” The grief that follows death is further explored in “after the obit” as the speaker ponders how “death exudes its own scent, but grief//is sensed in colognes wafting/from darkly-dressed handshakes,/in cups of too strong coffee.” The initial pains of death and funeral ceremonies fade, but grief remains afterwards “in the first time you make tomato sauce,/sense your mother’s absent hands/in the aroma of tomatoes stewing.” These are the unexpected ripples of grief that follow a loss, surprising and occurring when least expected. These pangs are not to be mapped or reined in by a contrived socially imposed timeline; the heart simply won’t have it.

Sgroi uses Latin consistently throughout her collection, and I found the glossary at the back of the book, with the translation of the names of species—for plants, birds, animals, and insects—was helpful. She plays with language throughout, with both English and Latin words, as well as with the idea of how the craft of writing and storytelling is not unlike the ways of the natural world, so that the reader begins to think about how language can be as fluid as the changing of the seasons. The two—language and nature—are carefully and artistically interwoven.

What is different about In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, structurally, is the inclusion of two reflective poems at the end of the book. “Binding” includes one poem, “of the first part,” which speaks from the first-person point of view, while the second poem, “In other words, two,” is written in third-person voice. Both are two sides of a coin, or mirrored likenesses, or perhaps even something like an overheard conversation between the poet and the natural world. In closing the collection with this dual-voiced, reflective piece, Sgroi offers her creative and poetic modus operandi. If the reader has any question of the poet’s intention, “Binding” offers some potential answers to questions that might have been posed in the reader’s mind. Best, then, to read the poems first, and then to arrive at the reflection having experienced the work of its own accord.

Renée M. Sgroi’s newest collection is one for gardeners, yes, and for those who love the natural world, certainly, but it’s also for those who want to explore the intersections that exist between humans and the natural world, even as it might be cajoled into the form of a backyard garden plot to offer a structure for contemplation. Here there are thoughts of what it means to be with the land, as settler, but also of how to live in concert (as best possible, and in good conscience) with the land and its creatures, plants, water, and earth. In a Tension of Leaves and Binding leaves a reader, then, with thoughts of how to be in the world, how to journey through this life, and how to find anchor points of comfort and contemplation in times when we recognize our temporal nature, our own mortality, and our responsibility to leave things better than we found them when we depart, rather than worse.

 

 

 

 

 

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

Kim Fahner : Weather, by Rob Taylor

Weather, Rob Taylor
Gaspereau, 2024

 

 

 

 

Rob Taylor’s new collection of poems, titled simply as Weather, roots itself firmly in the earth of the pandemic lockdowns. During that time, while living with his wife and two young children in a small, two-bedroom apartment, Taylor would often venture out into the nearby woods of Port Moody’s Shoreline Trail on Burrard Inlet with a camping chair. There, he would come to “find pockets of quiet” to work on editing projects, but also to work on writing haiku that captured the strangeness of that time in human history. I find Taylor’s choice of poetic form very interesting because the lockdowns of the pandemic were often periods of time when words couldn’t really manage to convey the internal (and external) upset we all experienced. In the footsteps of haiku masters like Basho and Issa, too, Taylor also acknowledges that it was his goal, in writing the poems, “to include not one unnecessary syllable.” The precision of his word choice and phrasing makes the poems seem like tiny meditative pieces that might lead a reader to respite, and maybe even to enlightenment, too.

Weather begins with images of birth, even while the poet alludes to his father’s death when he himself was just eleven. Taylor situates himself as a father without a living father, but is also suggesting to the reader that there are cycles in the natural world that can bring comfort even as we grieve our individual and collective losses. He begins with mention of labour and birth, writing of the “rinsing and rinsing/matted birth from her hair—/my wide-eyed daughter.” Caught in “mid-dream” the poet writes, “my father’s voice becomes/my daughter’s cry.” Even while life events occur, when he faces a “restless night…driving my step-father/to Emergency,” there is the mention of “the surface of the moon” and the way in which “a crow at the window/bends the tip/of a four-storey tree.” Faced with her worry for a friend who has been diagnosed with “stage four,” the poet’s wife is “up late tonight/scrubbing pots.” Then, there are the late nights, as the poet is “springing/from my warm bed—/the hospital’s call.” The thing in Weather that feels undeniably true is that Taylor documents life’s happenings—the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as we so often narrowly qualify and categorize them—while reminding readers that we can find respite in the moments that offer us beauty or wonder as flashes of necessary distraction and welcome comfort in difficult times. 

Early on in this series of poems, “a great blue heron/snatches hatchery smelts—/afternoon rain,” and carries on to appear again in “The Creek,” as “the father of two/watches/the heron” while “the heron/watches/the water” to track “imagined/minnows” that pass beneath the surface of the water. One watches the other while “the baby writhes/silently/in her carrier.” There’s a chain of being happening here, and it all finds its origin in the need to observe carefully and then document the images as moments of cameo-etched beauty.

Taylor also includes free verse poems alongside the haiku, and pieces like “The Mountain” continually show the contrast between the pandemic lockdown world and the natural one. There are the mountains that “birth bears” as humans “shoot them/or shoo them away,” while “one hundred crows/burst from the tree line/over the inlet,” and “in every stream/salmon” are “breaking open” the water. While the world got very still during lockdown, the activity of the natural world continued, oblivious to human activity. Birds seemed louder in their conversations, and the running water of streams and rivers felt more present, somehow less obscured. In that natural world, the one that is so often dampened and muffled by our excessive human noise, many of us found respite during lockdown times. Taylor’s time spent writing and editing in the woods, or along the stream or inlet, is about being able to take deep breaths during a time when that often seemed a hard thing to do.

Creatures of all sorts make appearances throughout Weather—from herons, to eagles, crows, wasps, mosquitoes, bears, bats, fish, to neighbourhood dogs on walks with their respective humans. All the creatures stay busy with their own work and aren’t at all distracted or phased by news reports or government updates of any virus or vaccine.  In “Fledgling Count,” the poet witnesses a juvenile eagle that has “discovered/the heron nests,” but also mentions that the young bird is “Alone/untrained” and so “it stumbled//killed few/left hungry.” Time’s passage, too, is marked by the ways in which the trees change through the year, and by the poet’s mention of snow’s arrival. The pandemic was a time without time, and one some don’t want to recall, but Taylor does a brilliant job of catching the nebulousness of it all in Weather, in capturing the watercolour, blurry uncertainty of what happened. Each of us had ‘our own pandemic,’ as people so often say in thoughtful conversation, but some of these remembrances—of finding comfort in being with the birds, trees, and animals—will likely seem familiar to most readers.

In Weather, readers will find a ribbon of haiku that offer painterly imagery that loops backwards and forwards as memories connect to observations of current happenings. There’s a comfort to this notion of continuity, of carrying on during challenging times, but also of remembering to be more still in our observations of what is going on in the world around us. While there can be chaos outside, if we can find that stillness inside—through the strength and elegance of beautifully crafted haiku, even—perhaps we will also find some solace and respite. Everything offers us a glimpse of wonder and beauty if we pay proper attention each day, and Taylor’s work—especially in these chaotic times—offers a few moments of peace.

 

 

 

 

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

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 : Blue Atlas, by Susan Rich

Blue Atlas, Susan Rich
Red Hen Press, 2024

 

 

 

 

I first came to meet Susan Rich, and to read her poetry, in Summer 2012, on a writing retreat at the Anam Cara Writers’ and Artists’ Retreat in Eyeries, County Cork, Ireland. I signed up for her ekphrastic poetry workshop, which ran a week, and for which I will always be grateful. I’ve been an admirer of her work ever since. Her most recent book, Blue Atlas, documents a challenging childhood, a yearning for the world of travel and exploration, and tells the story of an unplanned pregnancy and abortion. This is a collection that speaks of a fully led life, one leapt into with curiosity and a keen desire to learn more about the world and its people. It’s also a collection that has, as its centre, a pinpoint of loss that ripples outwards, and a poetic reflection that questions the complexity of life’s experiences.

The poet begins the collection by documenting what it feels like to experience an abortion that is not of their choosing. In the poem, “Arborist/Abortionist,” it’s revealed that the abortion was arranged “by anxious relatives” who wished for a “disappearing act,” and that the doctor “extracted the troublesome little branch/that obscured the golden overlook.” The one thing that would certainly change the landscape of a life is removed. In “Metaphors,” the metaphor continues to build as there are references to the fetus as an “unfinished dance step—unripe mango;/an infinitesimal beansprout cut back/to the nub” and of how it feels to engage with the conundrum “of choice/no choice.” There are, too, references back to the Blue Atlas Cedar tree that is native to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. A gymnosperm, “the Blue Atlas has neither flowers nor fruits. It is the hardiest species and can reproduce spontaneously from seeds.” The metaphor of this particular tree, along with other plant images and metaphors, is one that the poet weaves through the collection.

In a section titled, “Compass of Desire,” Rich creates an archive of past lovers. In the poem, “No One Knew,” the poet conjures the electric magic of first love at sixteen, with the speaker remembering how “He appled and oranged me afternoons/in his bedroom.” The two “were each/other’s first what? Our idea of what might be?” Another poem, “Anatomy of Desire at the Cactus Café,” captures the intensity of the magnetic pull that exists between two lovers, an indescribable attraction that cannot be denied, with the poet writing: “I’d still tip my mojito to the muse of hands//almost meeting, shoulders nearly touching—/the desire for human pretzels rising above//our heads in little thought balloons.” The lovers become “weed-wild and wonderous—//a page torn from a blue pocket notebook/or the first hum of a feral embrace.” Here is a poet who uses language, and brilliantly crafted poetry, to paint a vivid and artistic picture inside the reader’s mind and heart. She moves from documenting past loves to working through a series of pieces that become a post-abortion narrative.  

Loss permeates the poetic fabric of Blue Atlas. The poem “Once Mother and Father Were Buried,” the second in the section titled “Apparitions,” is a witnessing of what happens after we lose major figures in our lives, in terms of how the things they leave behind become artifacts of a life: “After the garlic press, the musical penny bank,/the silverware from a rosewood box/were presented, argued over, stripped bare—” and “after the claiming of the Seder plate, inlaid Aladdin table, and father’s Hamilton watch,” the question arises as to “what did we learn of belongings?” The reader sits uncomfortably, knowing the tug of war that occurs between siblings after parental deaths. One possibility is “total sibling divorce, division, and “lives cracking open.” This section of the book deals with the ghosts of loss. Here are dead parents who haunt, and a “ghost-child” spoken of as “little biscuit, lemon peel,”  as well as a former love who slams the door and leaves silence behind him as “a fast-forming habit that untied its shoelaces,/sank into the loveseat and prepared to stay/up with me all night,” to a tiny bee or yellow jacket that stings and departs, so that “all I have left//of him is a raised scar, burning like a silver dollar.” Yes, I kept thinking as I read through Blue Atlas, this is exactly what loss of all incarnations is like. It wounds, scars, and haunts you for the rest of your life, and so you are forced to wrestle with it for as long as you live.

It makes perfect sense, then, that Rich references a well-known and loved American poet (who is sometimes claimed by Canada, as well) in “Compass” when she writes: “Elizabeth Bishop often kept a compass/in her small jacket pocket,” as she “regularly fell from a delicate/map of sobriety, lost her keys, entire weeks—even countries.” Rich suggests, near the end of the poem, that perhaps “her brokenness could orient her” to move forward from great loss and grief. This is what Rich does in all her work in Blue Atlas—she nudges her reader to see the world in all its detailed sorrow and joy, creates images and metaphors that paint visual art on the page, and reminds them that life is complex, challenging, and richly rewarding. Our tenacity as humans is honoured in these poems, as well.

What will most stay with me as a reader is the idea that the poems of Blue Atlas speak to the need to not search frantically for closure or try to box up past experiences into categories. Our lives are timelines like the plots we read in novels, but they are never linear ones. In “String Theory with Heartache,” the poet writes: “But what if the point/is not the point? Under the world’s microscope we see that//no picture frame, no old love, no sigh/actually stays still.” In the places where we experienced trauma in our younger lives and incarnations—whether locked in dark attics by siblings, or in dealing with the ripple effect of pregnancies that have been ended, or in dealing with the expectations and social pressures of our parents’ inherited religions—we hope for some sort of clarity. The place where we might find peace comes from our acceptance that our paths, our life choices, have been complex and often painful. In “Binocular Vision,” there is a poignant sense of ‘what if’ that hovers above the words, as the speaker wonders whether the “zygote/who never becomes” might be “a geologist or lounge singer.” The poem ends with the speaker defining herself as “half-mother,//half-old crone, longing for/my lovely disembodied—my dear, body of a boy.” In all our human gains and losses, and in our learning, we are haunted by absences that we must learn to live with as we continually move forward. This is what Susan Rich’s Blue Atlas has reminded me—to be kind to younger incarnations of myself, to be mindful of each moment I’m here, and to show compassion to myself and others.  

 

 

 

 

 

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 : The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman, by Agnes Walsh

The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman, Agnes Walsh
Breakwater Books, 2024

 

 

 

 

Admirers of Agnes Walsh’s Oderin (Pedlar Press, 2018) will be rightfully thrilled to read her newest book of poems, The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman. In this collection, Walsh once again weaves Irish and Newfoundland folklore into her work, including words and phrases that are common to Newfoundland specifically, and once again opens the door to let the sea into the ‘house’ of her poetry. Its presence is a constant, and the sea changes and rhythms that can be observed in the physical Atlantic ocean are mirrored in the humans who live on its shores.

Walsh contemplates what is ‘inside,’ versus what is ‘outside’ throughout this grouping of poems. In the poem that opens the book, “Seeing Nothing,” she writes of how the caribou move in a herd along the cape road, noting “the silence in their bodies” as “their ears twitch at the swirling snow,” and “the crows fly backwards/in the updraft of snow.” Opening the car window means that you let the other world in—that of the caribou—so that you “are only a thief in the night/stealing emptiness.” In “Tonight the River Is a Silver Thread,” the poet paints an image of the moon as it “slides out from the cloud/and throws itself into the river.” At that point, the speaker comes to the realization that “I am/pulled out of myself/and back into the world,/into the light of night.” The idea of feeling disconnected, as a human, is reinforced in “What Are We Trying for Here?” In a  poetic nod to Mary Oliver, perhaps, Walsh reminds the reader that, “If you are stretched too thin with/your worry, think again how to look/upon the frozen river, how it is moving/just the same.” The end of the poem tips its hat to Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript,” in the lines: “Perhaps the universe will/catch us off guard,/give us grace.” In “I Walk Wanting to Hear,” the poet tells of how mindfully walking along a frozen path—in hearing “the echo/of the crackling frost,/of the singing water” is helpful in “calming the cacophony/inside my head.” She reminds us that we are small, and that our lives are so very transient. In our worries—and in the way we rush about mindlessly while we live out our often made-much-too-busy days—Walsh suggests that we need only observe the natural world more closely to get a sense of respite.

This lesson is reinforced in The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman when the poet writes about how it feels when your body rebels because of physical illness. In considering the scope of the sea, the weather, the landscape, and in the various creatures that populate air, land, and water, Walsh realizes “the grace I am given/by this clear day: [is] the chance to forget/the illness.” The poems that lead up to these cancer diagnosis poems reference fear, how it burrows deep into a person when they know that something feels ‘off’ with their health. “White Against White” names it, referencing a mammogram that finds “something,/not something discreet,/a definite small invasion.” The beauty of the fog that obscures—even for just a short time—comes with the moan of a foghorn and, again, the poet writes of finding a sense of comfort in the place itself: “This is still more beautiful than any life/you could have thought up.//This is what carries you away from yourself.” In poems like “And So,” “And So It Goes,” and “I Asked,” Walsh documents the shock of what new knowing feels like at point of medical diagnosis, and beyond. In “I Asked,” Walsh asks the doctor for a cause. The response is “It could be/the environment, genetics, modern love.” There are no certainties, and the reader is reminded that none of us have control of our lives; we can only manage how we respond to our challenges, upsets, and losses.

Faced with a frightening diagnosis, there is—almost magically—also the arrival of a new love. In “Clearing Out the Shed,” the poet writes of sharing a task that is usually tedious and takes up a great deal of time, but then ends the poem with a stanza that sings of joy and promise: “Later, we got tangled up/into each other’s arms and legs./Another snarl. But this one/we weren’t looking to untangle.” The tension and space between the place where you are ‘just friends’ to where something shifts into new love is so perfectly captured in “The Silence.” To me, it feels to be a perfect love poem, conjuring a road trip and a sense of being on the cusp of new beginnings: “Your right arm is out the open window,/your head thrown back on the headrest./It’s a warm August day.” The driver speculates on the happiness that is a tangible presence inside the car, and that is comfortably shared between the two people: “You’d say that being there is the real happiness./But I’d say you should see how happy,/how tranquil, your face is now.” Contemplating the ‘in between’ space before love is clearly spoken of, or made real by giving it voice, Walsh writes: “I say nothing. Except to myself./That I love everything that this is/and isn’t yet.” This is the sort of space that only a poem, or perhaps a photograph or painting, can capture, and Walsh does it brilliantly.

As in Walsh’s previous work, the ocean is something that is alive and omnipresent. The idea of what it is like to live on an island surrounded by water and weather is constant in The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman. In “Ocean,” the poet writes of wanting “the savagery of it all,” imagining herself “down in it./A little thrashing about,/but not drowning.” She assures the reader, then: “No, I’m not doing away with myself.” What’s needed, the poet tells the reader, is “the freedom of dive, of flight,/the ocean’s surging buoyancy,” to “cleanse myself in its salt and ice,” and then return to the shore’s “slippery, kelp-strewn rocks.” In “Seaweed on a Winter Beach,” Walsh writes of walking with her daughter, of how they “climbed up the seaweed,/mount after mound of pile-up./It was the middle of winter and February storms/tore the kept from the guts of the ocean,” as if they were “sea nymphs on dry land/claiming our kelp-hair,/our kelp-clothes.” They stretch their limbs to touch frost and snow, “stayed until the burning/of the cold set in./Until our sodden clothes threatened/to freeze us in place.” The seductive magnetism of the sea is present in several of Walsh’s poems, including “At Night the Sea,” when she writes of how the ocean is “all push and pull,/all force,/all solitude and sprawl./But utterly contained./Nothing to do with us,/yet its pull owns us.” An ocean, the poet says, is so deep that it “must hold such darkness.” It becomes, perhaps, a metaphor for what’s inside a person, further emphasizing Walsh’s poetic dance between internal and external spaces, and between past and present places.

The culture of Newfoundland, and of Ireland, is also a constant in this book of poems. In “Tain/Tain Bo Cuailnge” and “Seisiun,” for instance, the poet reaches back to the story of The Cattle Raid of Cooley, which is an epic tale in Irish mythology, and then conjures the beauty and power of a seisiun. Walsh alludes to the importance of very old tales in Irish culture, ancestral  connections that tell her “keep on with it—/the old connection, the epics,/the cycles, the language,” and then speaks of how the sean nos style of singing calls to her, “pulls out of me,/as if an ancient voice/has a hold to/a thread in my chest/and every now and then/gives it a good tug,” so that she writes “And it isn’t me remembering./And I don’t know that ghost’s name.” Some things are not to be explained, but instead accepted as part of an unnameable inheritance.

There is so much to say about Agnes Walsh’s The Wind has Robbed the Legs off a Madwoman, from its creation of a world that is closely and very poetically seen and documented, to its vulnerability and power in engaging the ideas of mortality and continuity. The poems in this collection are tender, honest, and alive in their beauty, and everything is so well crafted. In the title poem, which comes at the very end of the book, Walsh writes of the image of a madwoman, someone who dances and spins wildly—woven into the cultural and geographical landscape of Newfoundland—asking her reader to consider whether they can imagine that woman hearing the music of heavenly bodies, and whether there might be “a madder music somewhere/that undoes us all.” What the poet leaves us with is the idea that this life—like the lives that have come and gone before this one we currently live—is something to be lived and danced passionately and welcomed despite all of its uncertain and often unruly complexities.

 

 

 

 

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 : Rebellion Box, by Hollay Ghadery

Rebellion Box, Hollay Ghadery
Radiant Press, 2023

 

 

 

 

Hollay Ghadery’s debut poetry collection, Rebellion Box, takes the shape of a poetic container that encapsulates so many wonderings. It includes posed questions—sometimes with unanswered responses—to thoughts around the social limitations that have been oppressively placed on gender, identity, motherhood, race, and even mortality and the passage of time itself. The poet wonders why the rich chaos of possibility has been erased in favour of more limiting forms.

Historically, rebellion boxes were carved by rebel prisoners in Upper Canada during the 1837 Rebellion. Ghadery’s title poem is a love poem written by Joseph Gould to Mary—the girl he loves—with letters sent from Joseph through to Mary’s mother. In the poem, Joseph says: “Tell Mary I think of her often. It can hurt/to think of myself like this: all stone and soot, but rest/assured my present circumstance is not finite.” Through his incarceration, he warmly recalls better times that were spent with Mary and her parents, clearing land for their farm. While incarcerated, Joseph writes about having been stung by some bees, but says that the very thought of Mary dressed in blue “was something else to think about” to distract him from the pain. He parallels it to his situation in prison, of being trapped and wanting to escape.

This notion, of finding beautiful things or memories to lift us up when we’re struggling in our lives, is found in several poems throughout the collection, but it is also the metaphor and symbol of the rebellion box that contains the wide and wonderful universe of Ghadery’s well-crafted poems. Here is a literary and poetic container into which a person can confide their worries, curiosities, and philosophical questions. Even if they are not answered, the questions—and their various potential answers—are kept safe inside the box from the start to the end of a person’s life.

Ghadery’s exploration of how a woman evolves as she ages is clearly established in the voice that is presented in Rebellion Box’s very first poem, “Postcard, Santa Maria,” in which the speaker considers how they have changed over time. To begin, there is the image of a young girl, “Stretched/to indifference,” and then there is a noticed evolution into adulthood as the speaker says, “I’m not that girl/anymore,” but who now is a mother of four children. In “Mom,” the speaker reflects on their changed identity, trying to sort out what they have morphed into, trying to find themselves in this new role as mother: “Coming and going/I’m all the same/to you. An/umbilical tug,” In “Psychomachia,” the searching for self continues: “I’ll never feel/like my old self again,” and “I can’t//picture a wall free of fingerprints,” leaving the speaker to reflect on their “milk-stained existence.” The aspects of what has traditionally defined them have changed.

A long poem with a strong, meditative tone, “Psychomachia” stretches out over a few pages, echoing the speaker’s journey to becoming a wife and mother, demonstrating the ways in which a child can be both a “black hole” as well as a bright spirit who is “blinking/sparks” and “slingshot/smiles,” speaking of the paradoxes of how women might evolve as they become mothers. Here is a contemplation of what it means to have achieved what was dreamt of—having children—but also having to then balance and renegotiate (or even rediscover) who the speaker has become over time. It’s a tricky balancing act on a highwire some days, this life, and there are references to how the speaker deals with their mental health and wellness challenges –as well as their evolving sense of identity--throughout the poems. How do you define yourself after you become a mother? Do you protect your inner sense of self, or accept and lean into this new being you’ve become once you’ve had children? How do you redefine yourself, and what do you do if you think you might have lost yourself in the process of transformation?

The thread of how we balance our lives in terms of mental health and wellbeing also runs through the collection. In “Cosmic Script,” a love poem between mother and daughter, the speaker references the idea that “darkness/is just the absence of light” and alludes to the wonder and beauty of comets: “Who knows where they go/Who knows what they see.//It could be anything,” ending with an acceptance of uncertainty in the phrasing “It’s okay not to know for sure.” In “Apeirophobia,” there is once again a reference to needing to find calm by accepting things and living in the moment: “you prefer/the past—it’s predictable, and/in it you have infinite life to live.” In “Runaway Universe,” the speaker asks the reader: “Do you realize, I wonder, what submerged/identities we women can have?” and suggests that the “restraints of civilization” stop us from exploring the universe’s possibilities. This sense of discordance dances through Rebellion Box and is the catalyst to get the reader thinking about how they relate to—but also connect with—the ways in which a woman’s life shapeshifts over time. We don’t notice it until we look back, long for the past, or think of how things have changed over the years.

Rebellion Box is a book of poems that both contains and protects things, broaching topics that are both difficult and challenging, but which also allows the poet—and the reader, by extension—to be vulnerable and open to poems that are raw, honest, and realistic. Ghadery also references the various wonders and ‘glimmers’ of the world—including babies and children—and aligns them with references that conjure evocative images of skies, stars, and weather patterns and systems. The poet, in creating this strong imagistic thread, uses her craft to lace the poems in Rebellion Box together in a cohesive way.

As we live it, life does not offer clearly laid out paths. Our initial intentions, so often imagined in our younger years, tend to shift as we gain experience. Looking back can lead to nostalgia, but it can also offer a growing awareness of beauty and wonder if we live more mindfully in today’s world. We continually try to figure out where we have come from, and who we have become through the process of living. There, in a woman’s journey of shapeshifting identity—Ghadery seems to be suggesting—is where the poetry and magic resides, if only we care to look closely enough to see it.  

 

 

 

 

 

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 : 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