Kim Fahner : what we know so far is… , by Conor Mc Donnell

what we know so far is… , Conor Mc Donnell
Buckrider, 2025

 

 

 

Parts of Conor Mc Donnell’s what we know so far is… remind me of some of James Joyce’s work. That’s a hefty sentence with which to begin a poetry book review, I know, but it’s true. Reading Joyce demands that you be patient, take time to think and read parts out loud. Sometimes, questions will be posed and not answered. That, perhaps, is why I like Joyce so much—because he demands that you toss off expectations of what you will be entering into and asks you to trust him. Joyce also loves to play with language, sliding around with puns and references to things that require the care of a reader who admires complexity in text.

Conor Mc Donnell is similar in that he plays with language and its slippery meaning, writing what equates to a long poem in book form. He includes content about science and medicine, pop culture and history, sense of place and geography, migration, and then considers how fluid language is, how it crosses oceans and evolves and shapeshifts over time. What this means is that the reader needs to sink into the poems, marinate in them and not rush through it with a too brief reading. This is why I love reading poetry in the first place: I want to escape and sink into a self-contained world within a collection.

In the “Prologue,” Mc Donnell references the pandemic, writing of a virus, but also writing of how vocabulary, and language itself “remains mostly recognizable.” The poet goes on to write “we can’t calibrate so instead we medicate. We drown the noise around/the signal but fail to perceive that which we can’t measure and frame.” Throughout the collection, the poet returns to consider how words and language work, writes: “I believe words are thirsty predators: pack hunters:/to be seen is death to the herd,/to be heard means death-en-scene.//Words cower in the long grass of language…” When everything else seems wildly uncontrollable and problematic, inside and outside of self, then the pattern of language is a recognizable net into which a writer might fall. That net, though, is not fixed but instead stretches to incorporate new and dynamically shifted meanings

Poems like III, XIV, XXVI, and XXX are ones that speak to the Irish language, to Gaelic words and ideas. The shift between the traditions and language of Ireland to Canada reflects Mc Donnell’s own life’s journey. In III, the poet writes: “The Irish for harvest is Fomhar (it also means autumn)./I say, Autumn,/you think, Fall,/as in: We harvest what autumns from the trees.” In VI, a family “huddled at the O.R. door” read the word “Harvest” and it references an organ donor harvest. In XIV, Mc Donnell tells the reader that the Irish word for ghost is taibhse, means show. He then plays with possible renditions of how that word can change meaning so that “Words worm their way in” so that “We criss-cross misplaced realities/to timeshare borders of purgatory.” Nothing is clear or controllable, and those multiple meanings and misplaced realities are shifty essences.

In XXVI, Mc Donnell speaks to other Irish words, referencing how “after a thousand years the English still call//me Paddy—my father’s name,” and speaks to the idea that the Irish word for shadow is “also our word for shelter.” There is no fixed translation, and there is comfort in that. A word or phrase can have multiple incarnations or guises, can slip between centuries and geographies without being pinned down: “If assonance & cadence/are foundation enough for poetry, play Dublin songs for all//involved:Dublin Dubloon City of Moonz Wake the Devil,/tell him Moon is up. Women, draw down & gather power//enough to mould monsters into birds.”

Mc Donnell, in XXX, writes of the Irish word for truth, thinking about how “the phonetic Irish for truth is fear in you.” What he’s doing is examining parts of language, and linguistics, to pull at the strands of meaning—encouraging his readers to do the same thing: to examine bigger ideas and consider how they are not always as steadfast as initially understood.

A pediatric physician, Mc Donnell writes, too, of his work in a hospital. The speaker describes themselves as “weary, bone-tired” and tells how they experience “pain where there was no injury.” The worlds of work, no matter where we live or in which field we plant ourselves and our career, are demanding, and one would imagine that a physician’s responsibilities must weigh heavy. The speaker says: “I grew accustomed to this being another part of me/but you say it is something I can no longer live with.” While a reader may not know what a physician’s burden is, they will likely relate to this push and pull of work-life balance, and of weighing out the value of time, care, career, and of the worth of a life lived beyond the confines of a scheduled workday.

There are other brilliant Canadian poets who are also physicians, including Monica Kidd, Shane Nielson, and Laura Zacharin just to name a few. All of them seem to explore the world in unique ways, and poetry serves as the vehicle that allows them the scope and sequence to undertake this exploration. There is, too, a place that poetry should hold in medical circles, perhaps revealing that the literary arts—especially poetry—can be used to express things that might be (at first sight) difficult to express with words.

Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is… is a book of poems that reminds this reviewer of a complex underpainting: there are layers of words, vocabulary, phrases, language, imagery, and meaning that encourage a reader to delve into possibilities. Here, the reader is invited into the poetic sequence, is asked to think about how there are multiple meanings in the simplest of daily happenings. This beautifully crafted and structured collection does not offer a reductionist reading of the world through a poet’s eyes but rather encourages the reader to go beyond what they know so far. Imagine, the poet seems to be positing, what else lies beyond that.    

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.

Kim Fahner : Hag Dances, by Susan Wismer

Hag Dances, Susan Wismer
At Bay Press, 2025

 

 

 

Susan Wismer’s Hag Dances is firmly fastened in earth, stretching its roots back to ancient things that speak of wisdom that’s learned from being close to the natural world. Each poem is like “the new-cracked egg of a just-born day.” Wismer’s series of sonnets, aptly titled “A Crown for the Kitchen,” conjures a redheaded spatula, a brown betty teapot, a saucepan, a pine table, a kitchen window, a corn broom, and a chipped cup. The kitchen becomes a centre point for conversation, the sharing of stories between generations of women, and the sacred place where magic enters the equation. Crone wisdom is present in this crown of sonnets and artfully weaves itself through the other poems in Hag Dances.

There’s witchy wisdom here as Wismer highlights the power of the natural world. Nothing is without spirit or soul. Everything—from weather and seasonal changes, to trees, rocks, birds, and animals—has a sacred purpose. In “Night Vision,” she writes of autumn leaves that “crumble, whisper/under three stars, white bands of cloud” and of trees whose “hands reach naked/through moon’s falling light//their prayers constant, implacable, rising.” In “Invocation,” the speaker’s voice is that of a wise woman who is depicted in the first stanza as a blurry watercolour that is reminiscent of the mythic Macbeth witches: “Black shawl scry mutter/stone spellbag herbs potions/boil iron cauldron,” but then changes point of view in the second stanza: “I am bent-fired on broomstick/in cackling flight/through obsidian nights.” In the final two stanzas, written in italics, a spell blooms so that the crone voice calls out, entreating Hecate to listen: “Hear me beat, beat away/at the imperilled heart/of the Anthropocene.” That speaker’s voice embodies the overall tone and theme of the book in its awareness of the importance of the natural world, and the rhythms of life—including the seasons of living, aging, and dying. This poem’s spell works at wishing away the negativity of the Anthropocene, reminding readers that there is always hope, even on the darkest days.

History speaks in Hag Dances, in poems like “Dresden Cup,” which traces the provenance of three china cups and saucers that initially sit by the side of a war-torn Polish road in 1943—"spare beauties of smooth rounded shape/some hesitant hand/brushed paint    over porcelain” but are carried by a woman “all through that war/scalpel and morphine/her doctor-hands bloodied” to England in 1945, and then used again in Canada in 2025. Artifacts of humanity pass through times of war and peace, telling stories of family history through a matrilineal line. In “Spirits,” Wismer reflects on her “stubborn Scottish pride” when she speaks of “ancestors made of madness” who were evicted by the Highland Clearances. Ghosts, they “appear in bagpipes, old rubber boots,/dance on worn kitchen floors” as “language lilts/shadows” and “ghost Gaelic traces lift” off a “flat English tongue.” In the various Celtic traditions, ancestors are as real as living people, so it makes sense that Wismer considers how time works in a lifetime, and through centuries. The veils or borders that exist between worlds and dimensions, but also between the lines that mark out generations of relatives, are thin. 

The notion of pilgrimage is present in the collection, with references to travel and to the Camino de Santiago, and mention of a world that is “already shattered/and still breaking.” Whether focused on the threat that exists to a single woman walking on dark city streets in “Walk Home,” or on the fawn that lies hurt on the road in “North of Verona, Canoe Lake Road,” with the man who “has fawn fur on his hands” when he returns from moving it to temporary safety before it dies, Wismer creates the extended metaphor of life as a pilgrimage, where the worth is in the journey, not necessarily in the destination.

Hageography, the last section in Hag Dances, plays with the meaning behind the word “hagiography,” which may refer to a biography that puts a person in a very flattering light, or may also refer to the study of saints or venerated people. In this case, the pun comes in on the image and symbol of what a hag stereotypically represents. Wismer writes of crones who are wise women, not women who have been demeaned by western society and culture. These are not crones who are feared, but oracles who offer wisdom to those who seek them out.

The figure of a bain sidhe (banshee) shows up in the poem “At the Crossroads,” where her image is described beautifully as being “cloaked in pale folds/of dark winter’s coming/rock water sky” and that her arrival is shown as a “dance to the glisten of sleet/frozen earth/keen skirl of hawk cries.” Rather than being portrayed as a terrifying being who carries the dying one off in her arms, as the banshee is usually depicted, this portrayal links her power and beauty to the spirit of the land, weather, and seasonal shifts. Hags, crones, witches, or wise women—no matter what you call them—honour the passage of time and growth. In “A Starker Form of Art,” the speaker writes of learning to “love angles, sharp elbows,/Straighter lines in the shapes of my age” and notes that they are “alive in the flesh of my own slow/dissolving, blurred lines through/my eveningtime eyes.” The body of the speaker becomes the “starker form of art” as “it dances a gradual/descent towards Earth.” Aging is no longer to be feared, but rather seen as a proof of wisdom that’s been gathered over time.

Hag Dances is Susan Wismer’s joyous poetic spell of celebration, of noticing how words and poems become magical incantations that remind readers of how time shifts and moves, how the natural world offers us solace through difficult times, and how humans are only here for a short while. The wisdom isn’t far from the noticing and mindfulness, and the peace is still possible in the times of war. The poems in this collection remind this reviewer of Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude or The Enchanted Life, books that recall ancient mythical stories that speak to where women fit into the natural and elemental worlds of fire, earth, sky, and water. Hag Dances speaks to women as they gain knowledge and wisdom as they age—offering something to share with those who come afterwards.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.

Penn Kemp : For You, Dear Friend and Fellow Poet

for Barry Dempster (January 17, 1952-November 27, 2025)

 

 

Thank you for your being, Barry, for
your care and kindest attention to all
whom you encountered, with grace.

I applaud your life’s work and a life so
elegantly experienced in its entirety.
Thank you for your acute perceptions,

especially for such exquisite poems:
they will continue to resonate forever
through our eardrums and our souls.

I applaud the choice to join your Love
in your own time, in your own way.
Thank you for your time here, with

the knowledge you will live on in us,
this community you’ve created of all
those who dearly love and admire you.

Thank you for how you so thought-
fully considered life: considere, to
be with the stars that now await you.

*

What courage it takes to cross
the boundary, the borne no-one
evades. We celebrate Barry, this
fiercely gentle man in his choice
to leave, lion-hearted to the end.

From Plymouth Brethren to brother
and mentor to so many, beloved
Barry leaves us in floods of love
and light for the final freedom of
surrender. In his passing, he’s still
the consummate teacher and poet
surrounded by all those he loves
and who love him, near and far.

 

Love and Blessings on your way,
Penn

 

 

photo from Words Aloud, Owen Sound Ontario, October 2023. Barry is to the right of the sign. The other poets are from the left Richard Sitoski, Stuart Ross, Penn Kemp, Barry Dempster, Daniel Lockhart and Kim Fahner.

 

 

 

 

Penn Kemp has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication of poetry (Bearing Down, Coach House, 1972). The League of Canadian Poets honored her with their Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award (2025), as Spoken Word Artist of the year (2015), and as a foremother of Canadian Poetry. Recent collections include: Ordinary / Moving (Silver Bow Publishing, 2025); Lives of Dead Poets (above/ground press, 2025); INCREMENTALLY (Hem Press, 2024); POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, an anthology for Ukraine (co-editor, Pendas Productions, 2023); P.S. (with Sharon Thesen, Gap Riot Press, 2022). Penn is active across the web with multimedia collaborations: see pennkemp.substack.com and pennkemp.weebly.com.

Kim Fahner : UNMET, by stephanie roberts

UNMET, stephanie roberts
Biblioasis, 2025

 

 

 

UNMET, the second collection of poetry by stephanie roberts, asks readers to consider what sorts of things are “unmet” in their own lives. Perhaps it is to do with expectations, with how humans tend to disappoint themselves when they have expectations that don’t come to fruition. Perhaps we are not able to meet one another with clear communication, or see our desires blossom into something tangible. A reading of UNMET leaves a reader considering what parts of their life have yet to be discovered, and what has missed or lost and not yet been found.

The book hosts a series of titular poems (with the word “unmet” referenced) that are placed throughout the collection, so that the reader is never really allowed to stray from consideration of what it is that is missing. If humans live too much in the longing and seduction of what the future holds, they miss what’s going on around them. The climate crisis is present here, in poems like “Catch a Falling Knife,” as the speaker refers to forest fires in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, where “Western wildfires bathe British Columbia,/soap its armpits in smoke/and carelessness.”  It is present, as well, in “Entanglement,” when roberts writes, “somewhere off the coast of orange county California,/the grandest animal that has ever lived swims tangled/in a fishing line,” and “in ottawa, on the fourth floor, near the rear atrium/of the canadian museum of nature, i sit/in the chamber of a blue whale’s heart, weeping.” The reader is left to ponder about whether it’s just too late, and whether other desired expectations can even be met if the world ends because of human greed. This idea can be shifted from macro to micro, from universal to particular, as it might be reflected in relationships between humans, or even between humans and the natural world.

There’s a distinct current of conversation in UNMET—between friends and lovers, between humans and the earth and water and sky, between past/present/future, between family members, and between well known musicians. In “Lady Fine is for Sugar,” the poet recollects a conversation with their grandmother, how she would say “You are well, not fine. Fine is for sugar!” and referencing the feminist strength of Cardi B who “levitated up a stripper pole/like a fuckin’ phoenix against the stench/of respectability politics.” Later, in one of the Unmet poems that appears early in the collection, roberts writes of how Marilyn Monroe “had this radiation,/nakedness was her tongue of fire,” but during church services, would force “smaller self against the world.” The reader is left thinking about how women can either increase or decrease their light for the good of themselves or others, and depending on what society requires for them to be successful. The notion of wearing masks, and of dialing down the intensity of desire or expectation even, is a way of not being true to self or identity. The systems within which we live, as humans—as women, as well—are ones that require study and navigation, but which also need to be subverted and rewritten.

A reader will find both glints of specificity and simplicity, as well as complexity in UNMET, just as they will in life’s journey. “Ordinary” times that existed before the arrival of Covid, seem to wobble and tip precariously, and roberts’s pandemic poems speak to the ways in which a current event or happening like “Monday quiet and empty streets,” nudge us into remembering “spring 2020/with all our suffering.” Loss was fiercely rooted in an unprecedented lockdown period when everyone was forced to go within, to the loss of the poet’s father, someone “taking leave in the midst of disaster.” Loss cannot be avoided, is woven into the way life shifts across the page of time and space, so the reader is reminded that the two ways of being—within presence and absence—are too intertwined to separate.

roberts’s poetic imagery is crystalline and vibrant, drawing the reader in with its uniquely surreal consistency. So many lines and phrases sing, including ones like: “In an empty apartment, you butter/A sandwich on both sides with daydreams,” “Wearing a lightweight twill jacket,/a woman walks out the door with her life,” and “A woman orders rose-shaped pink/pleasure with courage for tomorrow.” Lines like these are hypnotic, inviting readers to consider how a seemingly simple image can bloom into a brilliant metaphor.

Be assured: the sparkler on the cover is not the most important thing about stephanie roberts’s UNMET, but the image becomes a metaphor for the temporality of life’s journey. Humans strive so intensely for what lies ahead—maybe dreaming of “better times” or of expectations that might be met—but in so doing, often miss out on the reality that is life in the present. Nothing, no matter how much we might want it to be, is “perfect,” but if we focus more on the present instead of the past or future, we will ruin our lives “a number of times by wanting.” UNMET, when finished, leaves the reader with more questions and thoughts, evaluating longings and appearances, pondering how to best meet the world with thoughtfulness and compassion.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.

Kim Fahner : antibody, by Rebecca Salazar

antibody, Rebecca Salazar
McClelland and Stewart, 2025

 

 

 

In Rebecca Salazar’s antibody, the collection that follows on her equally stunning book, sulphurtongue, the poems are rooted in the physicality of human bodies, and grapple with the damage that can be done to a person through sexual violence, PTSD, and trauma. In a place of such darkness, where does one find slivers of light? After a wounding comes healing and then a reclamation of self, identity, and power. That’s where light lives in dark places, and that’s what is conveyed in antibody.

At the start of the book, there is a dedication that also serves as a trigger warning to readers. There’s an honesty here, and a clear voicing of what has traditionally been silenced, as Salazar writes: “To fellow survivors, this offering: these poems relive in graphic detail the experience of sexual violence, silencing, pregnancy loss, chronic illness, and suicidality. What matters more than this book is your consent, your agency in choosing whether or how much of it you read.” The poet, then, at the very start of the collection, reminds the reader of the power of their own agency: it is their choice to read (or not read) onward. For myself as a reader, I read it in little bits, moving forward and then going backwards, dipping in and out as I felt necessary. It was a good lesson for me in how to think more critically about how to manage what could be a challenging, emotional poetic read.

In “True,” the speaker says they study the stories of true crime podcasts, researching men like Ted Bundy and Charles Manson “to read in retrospect how you/groomed me,” realizing as time passes that a memory must be recalibrated “to fit this profile” of “step one love-bomb,/step two gaslight step three nitpick step four blame shift step five break down step six death threat step six death threat step six death threat.” The poem continues, documenting an “explosive narcissist” who is “stoking flammable girls,” grooming them. “True” is logically followed by “Canon,” which takes on the voice of a condescending male editor or professor—someone who enjoys wielding their position of power to female students in the academic hierarchy, perhaps—all in italics: “my face launches a thousand/lawsuits for harassment,/but sweetie, you need me;/just look at your line breaks./allow me to edit your/unasked consent, break/your imagined hymen over/quibbles about hyphens.” Power struggles that exist because of patriarchal organizations have long been exposed by many women writers in their work, but these two poems remind the reader that not many things have changed, even with the rise of feminism over the years. Instead, the patriarchal rot settles in and roots itself in a toxic manner. It is in the voicing of these transgressions and wounds that the poet empowers herself, encouraging her readers to do that as well. Silence does nothing but perpetuate the toxicity; speaking up is the only way.

Struggle, and then survival, play a major role in antibody. Nothing to do with chronic illness is romanticized or glossed over to make it sound less challenging. In “Anaphylaxis,” the speaker spits out reproachful words: “tell me I’m overreacting/this body refuses/to breathe air with yours,” and hypothesizes that “survivor flesh rejects a world/that will not let it live/what can the gut derive/from whiteness and abuse.” The speaker is about to “tattoo this spell               in epi-pen & pfizer on my seizing thigh,” raising their voice in favour of masking up and fighting for greater accessibility. In the face of the dissolution of thoughtfulness around the world, the reader is left to think of what it means to be marginalized by trauma, or by chronic illness, or by a society that seems less and less caring: “I dare you/tell me i overreact/as my skin blooms with hives/ & just try/to shove your matter/down this swollen throat.” Female victims of abuse often—wrongly—find themselves defending their accusations when they ought not to have to be re-traumatized by giving voice to the truth of the offences committed against them. Speaking up against the silencing is so much of the triumph of antibody.

Some of Salazar’s strongest poems are ones with words and names erased. “SLAPP/article i, “SLAPP/article ii”, “SLAPP/article iii”, and “SLAPP/dissolution” are a series of poems that thread their way through the pages of antibody. Text has been redacted so that thick black bars blind the reader, leaving them to imagine names or places or specific references. SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) are defined by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association as “lawsuits, or the threat of a lawsuit, directed against individuals or organizations, in order to silence and deter their public criticisms, and advocacy for change.”

These blacked out, erasure poems are echoed in other poems like “Oilspill,” when the speaker’s voice begins with: “i name ________ and the world ends./run. stop writing & live in margins./never settle longer than a day, carry no comforts.” To speak up means that a woman must risk being further marginalized and re-traumatized. The legal trials that are meant to serve as retribution and justice for victims who speak up are not that at all. Instead, “our trials/taught us well to mince steps, locate drag marks/of a body pulled below.” Those who stand and speak up in support of the victim try to pull her from “apocalyptic waters” and “skirt sinkholes,” end up birthing her “back/to shore, her naked legs necrotic with black welts.” Their rescue of the woman who has dared to speak up lands them on the supposed safety of a well-established shore, but soon enough it is clear that the aftermath of a trial will “churn the beach into a tailings pond,/a petri dish where we, the specimens, are pinned.” Like dead butterflies or insects, to be marked and categorized, the fight seems sometimes too much to bear. One need only look at recent legal cases of public note in Canada to see how the women who speak their truths are retraumatized and punished. Still, speaking up is exactly what must occur for things to change.   

Salazar reaches into an ancient and rich metaphorical body of knowledge and wisdom that is constructed of divination tools—in the archetypal imagery of the Tarot, in astrology, and other ancient teachings. Here, too, there is a reclamation of old teachings that were passed down through the maternal lines. In “Too Late to Say Antediluvian,” the poet writes: “carmen and I bring molten spruce boughs/to the shell of the abandoned church,/adorning crook and crevice with the frizz/of withered branch. i lay my tarot on the altar/where the catholics once broke bread.” In the ruins of an old church, there’s a witchy reclamation of power, an upending and reworking of who has the power to tell the truth, the story. In “San Carmen,” a poem-prayer, the speaker says: “queer ancestress,/brown paper doll torn into convent/schools across los andes, pray for us”, “let us not/be known for silence taught us/by our fathers,” and “let our bodies never/line the gilt floors of school chapels/to be trodden on by men who claimed/our childhoods as communion/to be spilled.” It ends, triumphantly: “let none choose/for us how we choose to breathe.” No man, religion, or organizational structure should define what a person chooses to identify as, or try to push people into categories with labels on them.

Rebecca Salazar’s antibody follows on the heels of the excellent work that the poet was doing in sulphurtongue, crafting a collection of strong queer, feminist verse that encourages the reader to be brave enough to speak up against many types of systemic violence that result in societal and individual wounding. In giving voice to our truest selves, even in the face of intimidation and patriarchy, antibody offers us many reasons to celebrate persistence, tenacity, and the clarity of a voice that speaks up against silencing.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website at Kim Fahner -Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Teacher.

Kim Fahner : Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, by Paula Eisenstein

Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, Paula Eisenstein
Pinhole Poetry Chapbook Press, 2024

 

 

 

To begin with, a confession: I have always been transfixed by the story of Amelia Earhart. That she was so much a woman who came before her time, in terms of the life she chose to live, and that she just disappeared without a trace, is a mystery that begs to be explored. My friend, Matt Heiti, has written a play about Earhart called Ever Falling Flight, and I loved Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s novel, Letters to Amelia. Before I even saw Heiti’s play, or read Zier-Vogel’s novel, or Paula Eisenstein’s Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, I remember doing curious Google searches on her when I was much younger, wondering if recent photographic ‘finds’ over the years would pan out to become ‘the real deal’ when it came to finding her last resting place and that of her beloved plane, a Lockheed Electra.

Eisenstein begins her chapbook collection not with Amelia Earhart’s youth, but with a poem that conjures the time of her celebrity and fame—a time filled with flashbulbs and public appearances across North America. In “Winter of ’33,” the poet crafts a poem that moves across the page, writing about how Earhart’s “primary source of income/[was] coming from lecturing,” and how she “drove over seven thousand miles in six weeks/mostly alone/giving at least one interview at each stop/as well as the lecture.” At the end of such a harrowing and exhausting tour, Earhart “rented a modest house/in North Hollywood near Toluca Lake,” telling the media “she was on vacation.” Throughout the poem, Eisenstein braids in the image of “a butterfly pupa/going through a phase of life/to activate transformation.” The end of the piece is haunting, as the poet leaves the reader with the idea that “The pupal stage/lasts weeks, months, or even years/depending on the climate and insect species.” In contrast to today’s media (over)exposure of celebrities, Earhart’s encounters with the press and public seem tame, but—for her—were likely rather intense.

The poems that populate the early part of the collection refer to Earhart’s childhood—of how she moved between her parents’ Kansas City home and her maternal grandparents’ home in Atchison,  Kansas, a place where “Gauzy bedsheets/the dead once crept in/bloom in the wind/on the clothesline.” They also refer to her father’s struggle with alcoholism, and to her parents’ very rocky relationship. What is solid throughout this cluster of poems (and her life) is Amelia’s relationship with her beloved sister, Muriel. They “run worm races” together, making “a harness from a grass//blade, a sulky/of a small leaf.” In playing these imaginative games, young Amelia feels able to fashion some sense of control over her life.  

Eisenstein touches upon Earhart’s time as a nurse in the poem, “Toronto nurse succumbs,” writing of images that include open and decaying wounds, “bleeding stumps,” “bedpan chores,” as well as references to “the surgeon’s path” and “A cure that torments/and does not work.” When Amelia’s mother returns to her husband, in California, Muriel and Amelia follow, but, in “California,” Amelia (as the speaker) says, “Me,/I too am free like the black-capped chickadee//chick, that set off in fall to join a new flock,/about which studies show//no evidence of parental recognition/after the first year.” From there, Flight Problems moves into the flying poems. In “Opportunistic Cuckoo Egg,” Amelia’s voice speaks to the reader through time and space. She decries the addition of a man to her flight, saying “the reason: I/am a girl: I/am a nervous/lady: I might throw//myself out.” The man is just someone who’s been added to the flight to be sure that Earhart is protected, simply because women weren’t often pilots in the 1930s.

The poems recollect, and almost dovetail, the upset and struggle within Amelia’s family life. In “Preening,” the idea of Amelia purposefully creating an image or illusion is pointed to as including “riding breeches, lace up boots,//a well-tailored/jacket.” To complete the image, a “library book/on practical/aeronautics” is tucked under her arm. Cloudy skies in “Fly days” are compared to “our parents’/dog sick marriage,” and in “Mother leaves father, returns to Boston. So do I,” the reader begins to understand that Earhart was not impressed by the idea of marriage: “The doctor says that scientifically/he can make me/fall in//love. I don’t want to./There’s something wrong with me.” That doctor compares Earhart to a “caged mynah bird,” but what she feels to be, to this modern reader, is someone who was simply born before her time. She had a dream, a wish, and she set out to make it real.

A series of creatures with wings—both birds and insects—make their way through the poems in Flight Problems, further drawing a connection to Amelia Earhart’s own love for flying. In “Satin Moths,” “the spring lock of the cabin door breaks./The door hangs open like a mouth.” The people who are struggling to close the door, then, are referred to as clinging “like the satin moths//that swarm around the willow trees at dusk/in June July and August.” In “Passenger Pigeon,” the voice of AE (Amelia Earhart) speaks to her fiance, George Putnam: “your protective nature…reminds me/of an African Wild Dog.” She concludes, firmly: “know this:/I would rather dream./I would rather do. I would rather fly.” On the day of her wedding, in “Cowbird (Feb 7 1931),” the poet writes: “She kept her own/name though did not mind Mrs. Putnam/socially.” In “Black Swan,” there is, again, the recognition of how feminist Earhart was during a time when feminism was derided: “A girl can be/any one/she wants to be.” To fight against the cult of domesticity in the 1930s, to be the exception to the rule, would have been difficult, and sometimes I think maybe Earhart found freedom from the too strict conventions of a patriarchal society while she was flying her plane and breaking aviation records.

I reached out to Paula Eisenstein to ask her about her fascination with exploring Amelia Earhart’s story through the poetic form, mostly because of my own interest in the mysterious tale. She responded by telling me that she wanted “to have a heart-to-heart conversation with an imaginary Amelia” in her mind. That ‘imaginary Amelia,’ as Eisenstein calls her, “had no qualms with the kind of energy I wanted to bring to this project. She wasn’t fazed by my desire to investigate the less seemly parts of her life.” There’s so much of the element of ekphrasis in this poetic undertaking that Eisenstein calls Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, as the poet explores a very well-known woman’s life. Given the scope of Earhart’s accomplishments, and the fascinating way in which Paula Eisenstein approaches it poetically, it would be lovely to see this chapbook evolve into a larger poetic project in the future. In the meantime, avid poetry readers should be sure to check out Pinhole Poetry’s chapbooks, published by Erin Bedford. They’re beautifully crafted and full of excellent poems.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website at Kim Fahner - Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Teacher.