Noah Cain Reviews:

Chimwemwe Undi, Scientific Marvel, House of Anansi Press, 2024
Patrick Grace, Deviant, University of Alberta Press, 2024
Dawn Macdonald, Northerny, University of Alberta Press, 2024

Expansive in form and subject, precise in language and image, Scientific Marvel, the inevitable debut poetry collection from Chimwemwe Undi, hums cover to cover. In the opening poem, ‘Property 101,’ Undi plays with one of Leonard Cohen’s most famous lines—‘there is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.’ In contrast to Cohen’s mystic optimism, Undi’s work is grounded in clear-eyed concern with the conditions of the material world: ‘Because I am/ advised I turn advisory, surmise the gaps were not/openings through which to shine my particular night,/dark as the din of this country’s measured silence.’ This ethos is informed by her unique background as a poet, lawyer and student of linguistics. 

Throughout Scientific Marvel, Undi operates from an integrated posture that subverts contemporary demands for compartmentalization, flexing her command of form, rhythm and sound while testing the edges of language: ‘Good practice is dissolving my beloved/into traits, serving the language that I serve, and work against,/to dupe.’ ‘Property 101’ also introduces property as one of the collection’s central ideas—property, as in land and things, who owns what, how they came to get it, why they get to keep it and the consequences of what they’re doing with it, and property as in the qualities that make up a person, poem, institution, city, country, et cetera.

Some of the most striking poems in Scientific Marvel are erasures of legal decisions from landmark Canadian court cases. In these poems, which take the form of redacted court documents, Undi blacks out sections of R v. Grant, 2009, in which police officers stopped Donnohue Grant without cause and arrested him for possession of a handgun and marijuana; Baker v. Canada, 1999, in which Immigration and Citizenship ordered the deportation of Mavis Baker, despite her having given birth to four children and worked for 11 years in Canada; and Smithers v. The Queen, 1978, in which the courts convicted Paul Smithers, a Black teenage hockey player, of manslaughter in the death of Barrie Cobby, a player from the opposing team who, along with his teammates and fans, yelled racial slurs and threats at Smithers throughout the season. In the parking lot after a particularly abusive game, Smithers challenged Cobby to a fight, killing him in the ensuing altercation. These erasure poems reveal the racial violence and human desperation that is often masked or hidden beneath the sanitized, arms-length language of the courts and other institutions. In a similar manner, Undi interrogates the impact of the passive voice and what it means to apologize through a powerful pair of centos, a genre of found poem. These centos reveal how governments, media entities and individuals manipulate grammar and form to deflect blame, minimize harm and avoid facing the consequences of their actions.

Undi is also effective operating in a more playful tenor, most notably in ‘Winnipeg Poem.’ If you are a Winnipeg poet, proceed with caution before reading this one. In it, Undi draws on her experience in the Winnipeg poetry community (Poet Laureate, editor at CV2, host of the Speaking Crow reading series, et cetera.) to condense Winnipeg’s poetic tendencies into a tongue-in-cheek list of 14 poetic tropes. My first reading of it reminded me of what it felt like to be called out by my smarter older sister. It’s tough to be seen that clearly. Rather than getting defensive, as I did, I advise you to take a beat to sit with the feedback. Then splash some cold water on your face and find refuge in the fact that Undi isn’t punching down. She knowingly and effectively employs the very poetic tropes she calls out in ‘Winnipeg Poem’ elsewhere in the collection. 

Throughout Scientific Marvel, Undi rejects the constrained, judgmental and marginal ideals of patriarchal womanhood in favour of free self-expression, space-taking and embodied emotional release. With masterful command, Undi communicates interior bodily experience with intimacy and clarity. In ‘A History of Houses Built out of Spite,’ which is set on the dance floor in the aftermath of Amy Winehouse’s death, Undi contrasts the repressed, sanitized grief of the suburbs—‘the shrill peak of their voices demanding something far less beautiful’—with the catharsis of the dance floor where ‘lives the only god that thinks our wetness akin to holy water,’ where ‘we danced off the sorrow we knew / our mothers would shed.’

In ‘Song for an Endling, Unborn,’ she uses the surreal grammar of body horror—the image of an unborn baby gestating in a jam jar—to explore millennial torment around having children in late capitalism:

We can barely promise now,
never mind a future

to suffer through.
We’ll raise you,

pin our hopes to you,
explain what birds were

It is not just anxiety around what life will be for the child that consumes Undi’s speaker, but also what life demands of mothers:

Like all daughters of your year,
you will hear me crying 
from the hallway,

see me emerge chipper
and lacking explanation

Undi offers her readers no cosmic assurance that everything will work out fine, neither in this poem, nor in the others that wrestle with the biggest questions of contemporary life. Saying this, Scientific Marvel is not some doom-and-gloom portrait of the world. Many of its poems speak to the power of community and connection. ‘Call In,’ the collection’s closing poem, demonstrates the power of romantic love and just how good it can feel to be in the presence of another.

There is not enough room in this review to get into everything that makes Scientific Marvel wonderful. Like the work of former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, Chimwemwe Undi’s writing is at once intimate and political, inventive and grounded, heartbreaking and true. 

Deviant is a harrowing collection of confessional poetry that follows its speaker on a journey of queer self-discovery. In it, Patrick Grace explores the blurry boundary between intimacy and violence. Embracing light and shadow, Grace confronts readers with the beautiful and ugly ways desire can manifest in relationships. 

Written in five taut sections, Deviant begins with Grace’s speaker as a lonely, sensitive and necessarily self-sufficient child in the nineties who is slowly becoming aware of his sexuality. A confusing time for any child, it is especially so for the boy at the heart of Deviant, who is receiving little support at home and whose attraction to other boys leaves him without a model for how to understand and fulfill his new stirrings: ‘I imagined his kisses soft,/fists raining down after a soccer match.’ Without socially acceptable means to achieve the closeness for which he yearns, he retreats to the privacy of his bedroom, returning to his crush’s ‘class photo, swiped and squirrelled/under my foam mattress, revisiting the fold//night after night like a bad dream.’ Grace also gives us some beautiful moments of queer joy and discovery. In ‘Arthur,’ a high point in the collection, he communicates the all-encompassing thrill of adolescent love as two boys experiment with intimacy on the sun-kissed dock at an all-boys summer camp.

As Deviant progresses, and his speaker grows up, Grace tackles even more conflicting and difficult material, including the feelings of powerlessness experienced by victims of intimate partner violence—both at the hands of their abusive partners and the police (see ‘soft stalker’)—and the realities of the drug-fueled circuit scene: ‘Someone bursts a glitterbomb/and I’m blown forward in the crowd. I’m asking for it//to be daylight again so I can sleep without dreaming.’ 

In its final section, Deviant becomes reflective, looking back having gone through it, remembering intense moments of connection and disconnection, landmarks in memory, ways to give shape to the passage of time: ‘I saw into his world and he saw mine/both of us woozy in our reverie.’

Spare and evocative, Deviant works because Grace has faith in the reader. Because of this faith, and through some alchemy of craft and instinct, Patrick Grace’s debut is vivid without being gratuitous, honest without being hopeless and somehow intimate and tender, even as it describes life’s violent realities.

Informed by her experience growing up and living around Whitehorse, Northerny, the debut collection by Dawn Macdonald, is a compelling counter narrative to the more common presentations of the North in Canadian discourse. In Northerny, Macdonald reminds us that the Yukon is not just a place where one can lay low after being called out, or a stop for an adventure or a haven for alternative lifestyles; it is the site of whole and rich lives.

Macdonald writes about northern life with depth of feeling and a loving absurdity, attuned to humour even when discussing the devastation of addiction and poverty:

Every Yukoner has died of a fentanyl overdose.
Every Yukoner sells ice to every other Yukoner.
Every Yukoner glows in the solar wind.
Every Yukoner votes for their best friend in the by-elections.
Every Yukoner knows how to build a shelter out of egg cartons, parkas,/and tax dollars.

Northerny by Dawn Macdonald is an irreverent insider’s take on northern life that connects readers to a particular make-do-with-what-you-got philosophy without being glib or relying on tropes of rural life. It is also a deeply personal reckoning with love and home and a beautiful window into the sensory world of the Yukon. 

—Noah Cain