Lantern, Sanna Wani
Anansi, 2026
The
second full-length poetry title by Sanna Wani, following My Grief, the Sun
(Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2022), is Lantern (House of Anansi,
2026), a collection that self-describes as “Meditating on the beauty of an
ordinary life, Sanna Wani’s Lantern explores how we fall in love and
make a home. What does it mean to belong to a city, or to truly enter
adulthood?” Structured into cluster-sections of lyrics—“CRAFT,” “LOVE,”
“ETHOS,” “FAITH” and “GRIEF”—Wani articulates moments around entering and
settling into adulthood, from childhood memory and parents, relationships and
responsibilities to community, responsibilities to those one has lost and to
memory itself. “There are things that keep us sane,” she writes, to open the
short prose poem “SAFETY BLANKET,” “and things that don’t. For / me, it’s a
blanket as old as I am. What keeps us alive, / keeps us alive.” These are poems
about settling into a space and looking around, both forward and back, and
within the present moment. Assessing where one is, and where one has been.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about my Nana lately.” begins the opening prose poem,
“SEPTEMBER 26, 2020,” articulating a narrative around memory and loss. A bit
further on in the same poem, writing: “What would he make of my work? I wish I
/ could talk to him. He is my work now. There is nothing I write that is not /
his.”
There
is an interesting way that Wani’s poems seek clarity, as well as clarification,
attempting details from recalled events, occasionally caught in the weeds of
her own memory, and questioning what she might previously have been unaware. There
is a gentle sense of urgency on where she is now and how she got here, and the
sense that she needs to reevaluate, whether for city living, adult
responsibilities or what memory might hold. “Consider the kiln the clay will
soon / enter,” she writes, as part of the poem “POTTERY CLASS ON DUNDAS STREET,”
“its chances to crack or explode. / Consider explosions part of the process.”
One could say that the lantern itself is used to light one’s way, to illuminate
what otherwise would be only dark, and here she is, attempting exactly that,
across a sequence of first-person narrative stretches that meditate and question
as much as they reveal. At times, Wani’s details seem to hold to the abstract
for dear life, offering a slippage from the concrete to the metaphysical, or
allowing a stitch of the sentimental a thread, such as the poem “WINTER STORM,”
that includes:
Recently, I tried to
write a poem that started with, When it snows / the whole
world is in love. Sometimes I confuse
love with silence. Stillness. I’ve been
reading up on comfort and
chaos. I like missing you. I like watching the
day kiss the ground. If you
were here, you would tell me some fact about the
history of snow or how it
isn’t really white.
I
will admit I reacted, slightly, to the line “I use language’s tricks when I have
nothing else to say.” from the poem “THE BEER STORE,” fully aware of how much a
line such as this highlights Wani’s approach to these poems, far different from
my own (through which those explorations through language are entirely the
point). Although, while still working her point-driven lyric narratives, Wani’s
directions wander in curious ways, offering a softer sense of narrative sharpness,
of egress and build-up, allowing the question of where certain poems might
actually end up. She offers such delicate surprise, articulating moments, held
in the hand; composing notes on moments between moments, across lines not
carved in stone but gently crafted. She writes of ethics amid grief, cultural inheritance
and loss, including echoes of Partition, and the need for clear-eyed resoluteness
during periods of upheaval. “What use is reverence in catastrophe?” she asks, for
example, as part of the poem “LULLABY FOR GAZA.” I appreciate how Wani
articulates through poems questions around what it is she should be doing, what
poems could or should do, or even what can be done at all. It is said that our
purpose on this earth is to find our purpose, and these poems work through some
heavy questions of what precisely her purpose, both through and beyond the
shape and scale of writing, should be. What use, then, poems? And her answers,
as she finds them, not set as forever, but in those very moments, allowing for
the evolution of her own thinking to progress, as it requires. A few lines
further, in the same piece, as she provides: “We can’t give up. My job is to
tell you about the light, [.]”
rob mclennan is a person, place or thing. His latest
poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). His prior
collection, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025),
is currently up for the Archibald Lampman Award, which might be his seventh
time up for this particular award, making him, most likely, the Diane Warren of
the Archibald Lampman Award.
