Documentary long poem considers calamities

In her latest book, Long Exposure (Palimpsest, 144 pages, $22), Stephanie Bolster uses the form of a documentary long poem to consider the intersection of disasters and the impulse to document them.

In parallel to the past calamities that take the majority of the poem, Bolster weaves in a witnessing of a more present disaster, that of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: “April 2020// Those who say we forgot the Spanish Flu/ weren’t there./ The man who’s twin succumbed in infancy/ now coughs his diagnosis.”

Taking as her starting point photographs by Robert Polidori of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bolster’s poem ranges from New Orleans to Chernobyl and beyond, pulling at the supposed distinction between human-caused and natural disasters. Clear in the way she braids poetic vignettes is the underlying fact that the human distribution of suffering could not be further from natural.

One third of the way through the poem, Bolster zooms in on the evacuation of New Orleans. This section, titled KATRINA (Houston, Astrodome, 2005), opens with a tight focus on a single evacuee, a woman who “knows/ her name is the kind white people don’t hire,” as she looks for a place to shelter. In this vignette, racism and discrimination amplify the woman’s suffering. This pattern repeats, where human choices increase the fallout of disaster.

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In one of the first poems in Unravel (McClelland & Stewart, 120 pages, $23) Tolu Oloruntoba repeats a question that echoes through the collection: “Bhanu Kapil subjected me to (enhanced)/ vertical interrogation: (… )// How will you live now?/ How will you live now? How will you live now?”

Oloruntoba uses repetition to contain and highlight the emotional crescendos within a collection that balances emotional weight and philosophical rigour.

Anchoring his attentiveness to the dismantling of families, histories and identities and the way they are remade is his return to various animals. The speaker moves from the question of how he will live now to “find a fluency of happiness” by asking, among other things, “why the earthworm/ exiled from its other half/ never stops reaching.” Here Oloruntoba posits a possibility beyond the bisected earthworm, an image that also posits a possibility beyond the split self.

The anchoring of self to animal is more pronounced near the end of the collection, where Oloruntoba turns to Jacques Derrida’s essay The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow). In his poem It Is Common for an Animal, Even in Death, To Resist Its Own Deconstruction, Oloruntoba’s use of a prose line emphasizes the patience and pacing characteristic of all his poems, as well as drawing its energy from the rhythm of thinking. He isn’t making a metaphorical comparison in this poem — rather, he’s using the connection of the speaker to the animal as a site of resistance.

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Christina Shah’s debut collection, If: Prey, Then: Huntress (Nightwood Editions, 84 pages, $20), uses the experience of being a woman who works in heavy industry to explore the intersection of gender and class.

In the title poem, which closes the collection, Shah writes into the tension of this intersection: “the worst thing you can do/ is talk to a man/ like another man would,” In this poem, the speaker is bound by being both inside and outside the world of her life, and Shah is direct about the conditions that her subject position necessitates: “we can excavate the crawlspace/ like nobody’s business// and we can hunt and gather —/ so long as we keep/ moving/ laughing/ forgetting.”

The collection shifts between poems primarily driven by narrative and those primarily driven by language and image, and in so structuring the work, Shah defies the conditions, the “forgetting” imposed on her belonging: “egret, backhoe —/ hand origami’s/ carpal puppetry/ prepares her for/ the works and days/ of women,” she writes in “ulnaris/ radialis.”

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen’s first collection The Night, The Knife, The River will be published by At Bay Press in fall of 2026.