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.

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

Kim Fahner : Forecast: Pretty Bleak, by Chris Bailey

Forecast: Pretty Bleak, Chris Bailey
McClelland & Stewart, 2025

 

 

 

 

One of the poems in the middle of Chris Bailey’s new book of poetry, Forecast: Pretty Bleak, begins with a single line that echoes in the reader’s mind: “I want to tell you things of this place.” This is something that Bailey explored in his previous collection, What Your Hands Have Done (Harbour Publishing, 2018), witnessing and documenting the place that he knows so well—a fishing community on Prince Edward Island. It’s not a romanticized telling, and it doesn’t read like a glossy tourism advert, which is why Forecast: Pretty Bleak is likely so evocative and tends to draw the reader in. Anyone who’s lived in a town that has an economy based on a resource (like fishing, mining, or logging) will likely find this book resonates. They are all different industries, but the same types of hard working, down to earth people who pay attention to the rhythms of a daily life as they work away at a task to pay bills and take care of their families live in such places.

In the centre section of the book, titled “We Talked About This,” there are thirty numbered poems that establish the setting of the community in which the poet lives and works. The reader gets to know Will, Kenny, Tom, Kyle, Bianca, Brandon, James, and a cast of other people who make their living from—or adjacent to—the sea. Bailey creates the setting using vivid imagery and metaphors, writing “In the lane, mud, the burnt black/grey ash stain/left by garbage lit against a shrinking snowbank. Crows gone.” Then, he continues: “Birdshit streaks shingles on the house’s/south side. Crows pick lobster shells clean/in a garden yet to be tilled.” Later in this same section, the poet writes: “Yesterday, weather on the horizon/toward Cape Breton. Sun rising.//Slate-coloured clouds, their camber,/great columns of rain across the Strait.” Bailey moves from the rhythm of a community’s daily life to the danger of fishing the ocean: “My father’s hand is crushed/between a trap and hauler claw./Blood blooms in latex glove./White slough of dead skin.” In a moment, the job of fishing can go wrong, threaten lives: “You’d be loon-foolish to not be nervous/come Setting, all that weight, so much/rope gone over, all in thick fog with a rock/on from the north, and the tide against you.” A day’s work on the ocean can turn quickly: “When we go to sink the traps that first day:/nor’west wind, water whitecapping. A man in a kilt/stands on flagstone, plays bagpipes, his song/sounding like a funeral to each boat sailing out the run.” Nothing can be taken for granted, especially not a safe return to shore.

There’s a tension created by the idea of distance in many of Bailey’s poems, a distance that is both geographical and emotional. A love—for both a place and a person—is something that stretches like an elastic, an ebb and flow that pulls between Ontario and PEI. The draw of work and school in the west emerges in poems like “Starting Out”: “Your father’s eyes were pointed to Thompson then,/nickel mines. What they filled with was seawater,/mackerel blood. The scales of herring used as bait.” In “Moved Cross-Country,” the speaker notices the sharp contrast that Ontario provides to PEI, writing: “Lobster traps are décor here. Fishing is for sport.” Returning home, though, means a contemplation of what the notion of hard work means in a person’s life. In the last poem of “We Talked About This,” the poet writes: “You know what work is. We talked about this/before: an act of love. What puts food on the table,/electricity in the filaments…What else could work be?” The value of work comes in the ways a person can “raise four walls and be grateful,” demonstrate love in a tangible, everyday way. Sometimes, work and duty pulls harder at a person than love does, so that work wins out even when you don’t want it to. Sometimes work is woven into love and duty, and to the place where family history is so firmly rooted.

The sense of distance and tension between two lovers is constant in Forecast: Pretty Bleak. In one of the untitled, numbered poems, Bailey writes: “You send pictures of yourself, a video,/and say, I was thinking of you…Is this/how distance is supposed to be?/My eyes shut and I am with you./Why would I want to open them here?” Then, in “You’re Always Leaving,” the poem begins: “She says this, and it’s true:/ leaving the Island, that cradle/that once held you as a father/holds his child’s dog…and you’re always//leaving Ontario: the mainland and promised/new beginning with its cheaper bread/and same-priced potatoes and the place/you rent whose rooms are clear-sky blank.” It ends with “You’re always leaving/though you never want to go/and she don’t seem to want to keep you.” That long distance struggle in a relationship is also present in “Love Letter Written in a PEI Spring,” and in “Toronto,” with its first line: “She hates it here, but don’t think she will/be here long. How she speaks to you/about leaving…This wish she picks/as a herring scale from your hair, blows/away in hopes for it to come true…She cannot let go.” What this gets at, in many ways, is the pull between places, as well. A person can be born in one place and drawn to another—hoping it holds something more rewarding—but that same person can also find themselves torn between two loves, or two histories, or two geographies.

The other thematic aspect that’s present in Forecast: Pretty Bleak is the idea of what ‘home’ represents when you move away from it geographically. The speaker’s father says, “Home is a place the door is never shut” and that voice and its sentiment echoes through the collection. Home is a place that is filled with family history, tales, and the notion of what it means to live on the ocean, to inherit a life that is full of honest, hard, and often dangerous work. When the weather shifts, and a fierce storm moves in, and the house is “a thrumming low-toned tuning fork” while “Broken branches hold house siding./The roof has shingled the yard,” home is the place full of the people you most love and worry about.

Chris Bailey’s second collection, Forecast: Pretty Bleak doesn’t feel at all bleak, but rather is realistic in its rhythms and observations. I keep thinking of Bronwen Wallace, who often wrote about how the extraordinary events in a life are discovered by just trying to be more mindful of the ordinary daily routines that we so often take for granted, or just miss in our rush to get from place to place. Bailey’s poems encourage readers to take notice of his observations about the worth of place, family, work, home, love, and even the bittersweet ebb and flow of distance between people and places, but also leave them considering those aspects of their own lives.

 

 

 

 

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 : The Widow’s Crayon Box, by Molly Peacock

The Widow’s Crayon Box, Molly Peacock
Norton, 2025

 

 

 

The Widow’s Crayon Box is Molly Peacock’s eighth book of poetry, and one that speaks to the way in which a person grieves a spouse. Historically, traditionally, black has been the colour of mourning, but Peacock begins this collection by drawing on all the colours in a large Crayola box, not the “eight child-colors of crayon boxes” which are “far too basic and behaved” for the “emotional shades” needed to best describe the depth of great love and loss.

There are four parts in this collection—"After,” “Before,” “When,” and “Afterglow.” Peacock begins after her husband’s death, documenting the ways in which grief often unexpectedly arrives, writing, “After you died, I felt you next to me,/and over months you entered gradually/into that lake and disappeared…you’re done being you, and my loneliness is so extreme/that I feel moved by almost everything.” She writes of “memory water” and “the widow cloud,” invoking the power of scent that remains on the clean shirt that “emanates a mix/of perspiration, cancer drugs, and mint—/the Dr. Bronner’s soap you showered with.” She also references the rainbow of colours and designs of “thirty-eight pairs of socks” that are put out on a table, “once paired with Asics, now part of your myth.” In witnessing what’s been left behind, to begin, the speaker begins to build a new world for herself, knowing that she has no choice but to continue.

The architecture of the book works as Peacock’s poems move from present to past and back to present again. After the caretaking, the section that speaks to death, “When,” carefully cradles four intimate and heart wrenching poems. Then, with “Afterglow,” the poet moves into a reconstruction of life for the spouse who remains. In poems like “The Afterglow,” Peacock writes: “I miss our wordlessness/The brief touch of the hand/Like a whisper, midback//Now I live in the afterglow/Purple and peach streaks/Behind the near-night clouds//But getting used to twilight.” Upon her husband’s death, she “got up afterwards/You lying there alone/I stumbling out alone.” In “Organic Sadness, Compost Style,” using the beauty of anaphora to create a strong echo in the reader’s mind, the poet writes of how sadness surges after loss: “Like music shredding, no shedding, its notes,” and “Like a lush everything into every other thing.” There is no escaping the loneliness of grief.

Loneliness is a subject that so many avoid speaking or writing about, but Peacock embraces her dance with it, accepting that loneliness does not mean an end, but rather an assurance that someone was loved, that two people shared a deep love for many years. She describes loneliness as an abscess, or maybe “a line of infection/from a poison bite up an arm” that’s coloured in purple. It marks, as she writes in “The Realization,” coming to the final realization that “my lifelong friend is gone.” 

Anyone who has been a caretaker to a loved one before they died will find this collection resonates. Peacock doesn’t shy away from what documenting what it’s like to care for someone’s failing health while trying to mind one’s own mental and physical health at the same time. In “Petting My Husband’s Head in my Lap,” the poet begins by writing: “When I am so ill, I hope I can be/as soft as you are.” In “Notes from Sick Rooms,” a sonnet corona, Peacock speaks truthfully when she asks the reader: “Who really wants to be a caregiver?” This is an honest question, as most who have been caretakers will relate when she writes “But I hated giving what I barely had away./Losing myself in the tunnel of need,/down the gravityless jumble of trays,/cups, pills, towels.” The work of a caregiver is about how “love and illness mixed,” and how “a caregiver really is a mother,” whether they are biological mothers or not. Peacock continues, “How exhausting it is to mix the roles up./Couldn’t I ever just be a lover?” Anyone who caregives becomes a sort of parent to whomever they are caring for at the time, regardless of the type of relationship that might initially bind the two people. The balance of the original relationship is so often upended by how to care for the ill person as they face death.

Love poems like “In the Mood” and “Sex After Seventy” are reminders to live in the moment, to take pleasure in the shared moments. The poet writes: “Once it was clear that we could die,/we thought: Let’s make the end sweet.” There is yoga, squats, dinner, and then a dance to “In the Mood,” leading to “the bed! We reach for one another…If we can choose our end, we choose it this way.” In “Sex After Seventy,” the poem begins, “After we cleaned out our closets/we started on our sex lives…& met/as a long surprise of a spring afternoon arrived/through the threshold of the closet/on a spare bed we’d been saving all our lives.” What strikes the reader, when reading this collection, is that all the poems are woven into one another. Memory plays a key role, but the present nudges in to remind the reader that, while they can reminisce, they must also always move forward.

In the final poems of The Widow’s Crayon Box, Molly Peacock writes about the nature of the soul, the power of vivid dreaming, the beauty and strength of a long-lived love, and the passage of time as we grieve a great and close loss. The lessons she recollects, from her time as friend, lover, spouse, caregiver, and widow are poignant ones. In a world that all too often turns its head away from grief, this collection serves as a powerful reminder that it is all part of life, and that love continues to weave itself into the lives of those who are left behind.   

 

 

 

 

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 : Death of Persephone: A Murder, by Yvonne Blomer

Death of Persephone: A Murder, Yvonne Blomer
Caitlin Press, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

One of the most unique collections of poetry that I’ve read in the last year or so is Victoria poet Yvonne Blomer’s latest book, Death of Persephone: A Murder. If you love myths, and you want to consider rethinking and upending the old story of Persephone, then this is the poetry collection you’ll want to read.

As Blomer writes in her acknowledgements, she wanted to explore “how women live in this world, set against assumptions of women and girls in Greek mythology and the Persephone myth specifically.” In this re-imagining of the original Persephone myth, the character of Stephanie takes on Persephone’s persona, and a city that is suggestive of Montreal becomes the setting. In Greek myth, when a woman is taken or wed, she is basically raped. And, yes, if you don’t know the story of the original myth, you should definitely re-visit it for all the fine details as I won’t rehash them here. Suffice it to say that Persephone did not willingly become Queen of the Underworld, to rule alongside Hades, but was taken against her will and then tricked into eating the pomegranate seeds, the food of the Underworld, that would make her feel a connection to the place even as she was at the same time repelled by it all.

Blomer has taken a postmodern stance to this myth, subverting the traditional tale that most people will know and reconstructing it in a contemporary, urban setting. In doing so, she encourages the reader to imagine Persephone in the body of Stephanie, a modern woman who walks through a city of “dark paths,” “not watching, not watching/she knows in her bones the way,” and who is “a woman tattooed in streetlights/and moody nights. Hidden spaces,/forgotten bones,/graves,/grains,/faces.” If you’re a woman walking at night, hyperaware of your surroundings as you make your way home, you will relate to the heightened tensions of being constantly on edge.

Blomer’s postmodern kaleidoscope of multi-layered allusions to myth, history, feminism, and the genre of crime fiction draws the reader in. In this new telling, Persephone is raised by her uncle, Uncle H (for Hades), and she ends up living in the tunnels of the subway system under the streets of Montreal. The poems follow on the heels of one another, creating a narrative arc that creates what ends up being a novel in poetic form. The man who tries to solve the murders of women who walk through the aboveground city is a detective named D.I. Boca. The reader will follow the plot of Stephanie’s story through a series of Boca’s case notes, all of which are numbered, linked sonnets. So, in “Case Notes: D.I. Boca    No. 8/36,” the reader learns that, a decade ago, Boca “found a girl, dead,/her blood—memory a raised scar he traces./The graffiti, the paperwhites repeat/in pictures at every scene.” The murderer has left a graffitied calling card at each murder site. The original case, the reader learns, happened in Greece, years and years ago. There are paperwhites and a serpent in the modern-day sites as the murderer uses symbolic graffiti, all of which points symbolically to the original Persephone myth.

The repetitive graffitied murder motifs speak to how women walking in present times are still at risk of being assaulted or killed by men. In “Case Notes: D.I. Boca    No. 11/36,” the detective encounters a woman named Thea (after Athena) who is perched up on scaffolding. Calling her down, he asks what she’s seen, trying to find a witness to a recent murder. “She nods. She knows men, she says, the city,/men rule it like roaches. Men think they can/do whatever and hate women while they do it.” What Thea does, to empower herself—and other women, as well—is paint a mural of Hecate on top of the images of the snakes. In “Hecate, Painted,” Blomer nudges her reader to remember that Hecate was really more of a wise woman than a so-called witch to be burned by men when she writes, describing the image of Hecate that is embodied in Thea’s artwork: “Her eyes look up,/glow in the light from the bowl of fire—/amber, ember, light./She is the witch./She is the ghost seer./She is triple goddess, moon phases./She is the watcher, eyes/on every dark corner.” By conjuring Hecate so vividly, Blomer gives the women in the poetic story arc of her collection the power they have always had, but which has often been derided and feared by men. She returns the power to the women in the story, asking her reader to reconsider the myth, who created it, and why it is so unsettling to juxtapose it into a contemporary setting. Nothing, it seems, has changed that much, and that’s where the worry sits in a reader’s mind.

Part way through the collection of poems, Stephanie manages to go to university. In “Stephanie Walks among Street Art” (after Banksy), she “walks the city” after having managed to get away from Uncle H by going to school. In this poem, the protective voice of the speaker says: “Keep your hands off her, Uncle H./She’s got your soul in the nail of her pinkie. All grown up/she’s done with you. Not an orphan, she cuts through your cloying,/she weeds you out.” In “Police Station,” Stephanie finally realizes that Uncle H. is a predator who “did jail time, child porn” and is “a person of interest” in the more recent murders of local Montreal women. She recalls when she first went to live with him, at the age of seven, and the narrative turns; she remembers her abduction.

A tone of terror is present in poems like “Instead of a Murder, Why Not a First Kiss” and “Scratch,” which depicts a woman walking home, being followed and assaulted, left to die. A man walks into the woman, crashing into her. She apologizes. He does not. Then, “The man turns and follows her. Violence a surge, a fist.” While he beats her, he “leans in as if/they are lovers. Drags her back to the alley they have just passed.” This is visceral, vivid imagery, and it needs to be to underscore the threat that women face every day. In poems like these, Blomer creates an overpainting or palimpsest of sorts, so that the story of the original Persephone myth is viewed through a modern-day feminist lens. Persephone’s story is Stephanie’s story, and it is still rippling through the ages, just as horrific and misogynistic in our day as it was in ancient Greece.

There is a story here, one that overlays the ancient Greek myth, and one which speaks to how violence perpetrated against women by men is always still happening. It occurs on a daily basis in cities and towns across the country, and one need not look far to find examples of how the violence is encultured and propagated by patriarchal systems, and how easily society wants to avert eyes and not look, to turn away and say that things have improved over time. This would be a lie, a myth. It leaves me wondering what Persephone herself would think as she’s been given a voice that she didn’t have in the original myth. In her work, Death of Persephone: A Murder, Yvonne Blomer has woven a complex story in poetic form, one that is stunning, well-crafted and structured, and just fascinating to consider from a philosophical, poetic, and feminist point of view.

 

 

 

 

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 : Jesus is a Voyeur, by Bret Crowle

Jesus is a Voyeur, Bret Crowle
Frontenac, 2024

 

 

 

 

Bret Crowle’s debut collection, Jesus is a Voyeur, can haunt you even after you put the book down. Here are a cluster of poems that are firmly rooted in a prairie landscape that serves as the backdrop for a thoughtful poetic consideration of trauma, love, loss, and of resisting and pushing back against the oppression of a strict religious upbringing.

In “Memory’s Tether,” Crowle writes: “My father’s voice is the first I remember…embalming me with all he cherished,” conjuring the notion of decay and preservation, but also suggesting that we do not always want to inherit what our parents cherished as we search for ourselves. In “What Can You Have?”, the speaker’s voice is clear and firm: “You cannot wake up next to your girlfriend without guilt, cannot/have comfort.//You can know that the church will never approve of four breasts/sharing one bed.” In “How Will the Damaged Children See Heaven?”, the tone turns darker, with references to the abuse of children inside churches: “How will the damaged children see heaven?/Will they walk through the pearly gates,/straight into the arms of the Lord?/Will they be told that their lives were simply/just the unlucky draw?” Will the children be—the poet is asking the reader to think carefully here—cast aside without care or recognition? Will the church take responsibility, and if not, who will help them?

These are not light poems in terms of content, and Crowle’s work is an honest and thoughtful exploration of searching out identity, while having to push back against oppressive, patriarchal structures, while engaging in mental health issues, sexual exploration, and childhood trauma. This is not an easy journey, by any means, but one which many of us who have grown up with strict religious upbringings and parents will resonate with as we read. It takes great bravery to write with such a clear and certain voice, and that voice is also one that will haunt the reader.

Crowle does not shy away from dealing with the topic of mental illness in Jesus is a Voyeur, and this is evident in a piece like “Step-by-Step Psychosis Treatment,” which is a found poem taking lines from the FDA label for Aripiprazole. She leaves the numerical list of the poem undone, numbering various side effects and warnings for the patient, and leaving the last one without a cautionary statement. The emptiness of the last numerical point is left for the reader to fill in, in recognition of the idea that each person will respond to a mental health crisis—and treatment modalities—in different ways. In “Benji,” the speaker has suicidal ideations while contemplating a little white dog that “runs across my front lawn.” In “Hypotheticals,” Crowle writes in the style of a screenplay, documenting a stay in hospital to seek treatment for an early psychosis diagnosis. None of these poems are easy to read and think about, but they clearly connect to the theme of searching for self, and of surviving trauma.

Throughout Jesus is a Voyeur, Crowle also poetically documents her exploration of queer sexuality, and of figuring out how desire works and lives in the shadow of the too-strict dogmatic and doctrinal framework of Catholicism. The staccato tango of the conflicting elements of desire and shame is here, too, as could rightfully be expected when a person tries to deconstruct that framework and then create a new, more honest way of being in the world. After the struggle, though, there is a joyous kind of rising through confusion to discovery and acceptance of sexual identity and self. While religious structures are oppressive in terms of sex, what Crowle does is reclaim sexuality, managing to weave spirituality into it all so that the two are less at odds than might seem possible at first glance. The dismantling of the shame happens slowly, and is a lot of work, but that’s where the joy of the collection comes in.

In “Intrusive III,” a poem that celebrates the release of masturbation, the speaker says: “Under the smoke screen of holey quilt, fingers spread, stroke, slip inside/of myself…The statue of Mary on grandma’s dresser/keeps her eyes on me/as I cum.” This poem follows two earlier “intrusive” numbered poems that speak to sexuality, so the little tercet of poems serve as markers on the path to self-discovery within the very structure of the book. Then, in “Ember,” the enjambment of lines and images that rush into one another feels like a poetic embodiment of desire and eroticism. The first line sets the stage: “There’s an ember balancing between fingers” and the ending speaks of only a stub of the cigarette being left behind. In the middle of the piece, the speaker says: “You and the city make love to the night sky. Dissolve./Slip up. Melt into Cassiopeia (a breath in). Of release (a/breath out).” From initial spark of ember to height of climax, and then back to “A scent on breath./A ‘should-not’/buried back home in the yard next to childhood dogs and dogs and hamsters,” the sirens “have died off. Sky and streets and lungs/release.” Here, there are no borders between the need of desire and the satisfaction of fulfilment.

The beauty of Bret Crowle’s Jesus is a Voyeur is that the poet’s voice is one that is clear, has survived the pain of trauma and mental illness, and finds its triumph in a very vibrant way. The setting of the prairies feels exotic to someone who lives in Northern Ontario, so much so that the landscape becomes a character in and of itself. By the end of the collection, there are no divisions here, even though many may have been present before: the conflicts between a curiosity to explore desire and sexuality, and the shame that’s been taught and left behind by a religious structure, are no longer hovering. What’s left in the reader’s mind, at the end of reading Crowle’s debut collection, is a sense of certain rejoicing that the poet’s journey has come to a place of celebration of self-fulfilment. This is not only a tale of surviving so many complex struggles, but of flourishing and blooming brightly afterwards.

 

 

 

 

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 : Conversations with the Kagawong River, by sophie anne edwards

Conversations with the Kagawong River, sophie anne edwards
Talon, 2024

 

 

 

It’s refreshing to read a Northern Ontario poet who has so fully rooted her debut book of poems, Conversations with the Kagawong River, in a very specific place that is sacred to so many people. Sophie Anne Edwards has drawn on her previous works, entering the spaces where the natural world and language dance together in mystical ways that conjure the spirit of the place that is Manitoulin Island. As a settler, Edwards situates herself, in the very first pages of the collection, as someone who has learned to listen to, and learn from, Manitoulin’s elders rather than to risk thoughtlessly filling the spaces with uninformed talk or chatter. Conversations with the Kagawong River opens with testimonial pieces from Dr. Alan Ojiig Corbiere, a historian and language advocate from M’Chigeeng First Nation and York University, Art Jacko, who is the CAO and Band Manager of M’Chigeeng First Nation, and Josh Eshkawkogan, who is from Wiikwemkoong First Nation and is elder in residence at the Noojmowin Teg Health Centre. All three men speak to the careful way in which Edwards has approached her work as an artist. This is a wise approach to creating a book of poems that is hybrid in its essence and is written by a settler rather than by an Indigenous writer.

The word ‘hybrid’ suits Conversations with the Kagawong River in a very truthful way. Edwards includes historic maps of Manitoulin Island, creates concrete and found poetry from the text of the historic documents of the 1862 Manitoulin Island treaty (Treaty 94), letters, journals, and photographs, and also offers her readers a reference guide to the Anishinaabemowin words that are woven through the book. One of the most beautiful aspects of the book is that Edwards ventures out into the landscape of the river, leaving paper letters in the middle of bunches of cattails, or floating around the petals of water lilies, revisiting them afterwards—at intervals—to see if they are still there, or if they have decayed because of their exposure to the elements. She makes sketches and takes handwritten notes, documenting the decomposition of the paper letters over time. All of this, when a reader takes time with the book—returning to read it more than once—adds to the overall understanding that the elements and weather patterns are holistically part of the natural world and environment of the Kagawong River. This is eco-poetry, so the pieces in Conversations with the Kagawong River can be seen as warnings for readers to take more time in being mindful of their surroundings when out in the natural world.

One of the key thematic aspects of these poems is that active listening is key to better understanding (or entering) the ecosystems of a specific place. The river becomes a microcosm of the whole world’s well-being in terms of climate change and crisis. Edwards writes of the otters, birds, plants, fish, and vegetation of the area. Anyone who has been to Bridal Veil Falls will nod when they read “Spawning Salmon,” as Edwards writes from the point of view of the fish: “tourists snap/photos/to the rhythm of//seagull hopping/we return to this/claimed territory.” By the end of the piece, the salmon is anthropomorphized as it speaks to describe how “I prefer the quiet twilight/when all that is heard/is the River//a seagull swallows my/eye/and laughs.” In the piece that is thoughtfully placed on the opposite page, “Ed Burt, Salmon Stories,” the poem takes on the shape of a circle, making the reader think about what kinds of ideas should be at the centre of things in terms of what is most important to consider.

Edwards puts Burt’s words inside the circle as he speaks about the way in which pickerel were introduced to Lake Kagawong in the 1960s from the Spanish River. He has the historical knowledge of place that is required. In this fascinating found poem, Edwards has immediately nudged the reader to think about how invasive species have been historically introduced to Manitoulin by colonial and oppressive organizations. Burt’s words are powerful as he, a settler, speaks about wealthy tourists who come from away: “If you’re rich enough to own a thirty-thousand-dollar boat and troll for hours and catch one—well, it’s not my idea of fishing.” This place, which is so sacred to Indigenous communities of Northeastern Ontario, is at risk of environmental decline if it’s not protected by everyone who lives there. That, too, is another theme that makes itself known in Edwards’s work.

Throughout Conversations with the Kagawong River, the poet records her thoughts in diary dated entries, documenting her wishes, thoughts, and actions. In the entry titled “May 22,” Edwards writes: “I consider attaching a letter and a QR code to each ash with a link to a map,” so that she can map out the gaps in the forest’s canopy. She ends the piece with a heartfelt desire: “I wonder if I can join the grass before I die. Become grass and mud./Move beyond the limits of my body. I print a poem and punch holes/into the paper. I want to plant it somewhere along the River.” If you’re a northerner, you’ll know this feeling, of wanting to enter the beauty of this wild landscape body and soul, and maybe not return. Here is a place of possibility, of extending the physical self into the essence of a poem on paper, of planting it “where grass might grow up through the words.” Maybe, I kept thinking as I read Conversations, we all want to find meaning through experience, pushing through our own rough edges so that “the boundaries between human and plant” begin to disappear, as Edwards suggests.

One of my favourite parts of the book of poems is a series of pieces that focus on Bridal Veil Falls. When I was young, in the 1970s, I remember it being a place to visit, but in recent decades—and especially since the pandemic when southerners fled to the northern parts of Ontario to find respite so that they could be escape their big cities to be outside during lockdown—it’s turned into a circus of sorts. I remember, too, being there in my 20s, in the mid-late 1990s, with a few friends, and the four of us just being completely on our own while watching the salmon fight their way upstream to the falls. That would rarely happen now, given the marked increase in tourism congestion over the last few years.

Edwards points out the rush of people, using the volume of visitors to experiment in gathering their views of the falls. In “Gathered Words from Visitors to the Falls,” she boxes a found poem inside the frame of more faded words—spliced with vertical photographic slices of what the falls look like. The ‘inside poem’ is a found one, with words that were scribbled down by visitors, as she describes in “August 4”: “I have set a lidded wooden box on/another piece of limestone./In the box are pieces of birchbark found on the ground along the trail,/pencils and pens/a notebook, along with an invitation to write something/for or about the River/to send a message down the River on a piece of birch.”

This experiment reminds me of the work that Ariel Gordon has done in Winnipeg with her conversations with trees, as she invites people in their respective neighbourhoods to write messages to hang around the trunks (or from the branches) of trees, as notes of thanks, or even as confessional tales. This notion, of having the poet facilitate a conversation between humans and the natural world, is an intriguing and powerful one. The photos in Conversations, of Bridal Veil Falls on a busy tourist weekend, are surprising in terms of the volume of people, but also touching in terms of the tender photo of one person bent over Edwards’s wooden box on the limestone rock, writing their note to the river on a piece of birchbark.

In a world where we are so often over-stimulated by the noise that we ourselves create, the work that Sophie Anne Edwards does here, in Conversations with the Kagawong River, is the sort that is important in how it draws the reader into a consideration of how we humans converse with/in the natural world. Do we speak too loudly, or do we take the time to sit quietly on a riverbank to listen actively? What does the river (or the lake, of the hike through the bush, or the birds, or the moose) teach us? What Edwards is asking her readers to consider is our place in the natural world. If we are settlers and allies, we have a role to play, too, in learning and respecting the lessons of our many wilder spaces. Edwards’s work is a hybrid poetic call to first look outwards—to sit quietly and listen to what lessons come forward with close observations—but then is equally a call to look inwards, to question our own responsibility in terms of how we care for these wild places we love so that future generations will have a chance to love and protect them as well.

 

 

 

 

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 : 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