Politics of caring permeate body, city

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This article was published 25/11/2023 (694 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“What duty of care do we owe each other?” asks Nikki Reimer in her fourth collection, No Town Called We (Talonbooks, 112 pages, $19).

Throughout the collection, the (sick) body and the (sick) city refract one another, a theme Reimer confronts with urgency by writing into the political vector of caring: “we have tried and failed one million times to think myself back to health. it is false that no one loves me and it is true that no one loves we. there is not community inside the dream.” While the atomization of the community is intensified in the text by COVID-19, it predates the pandemic.

In But the Moon the speaker asks, “What exactly did you think the moon was going to do for you, poet?/ Why are you writing these words, line by line?/ Toward what widening gyre do we turn, poet?” The insufficiency of poetry to alter the course of systemic failures is both indictment and possibility.

Capitalism and the settler-colonial petrostate are moribund, which Reimer indicates with language that implies fixedness: “because death-cult capitalism must always name activities passé that hit mainstream uprising.” In contrast, while the speaker’s addresses to “poet” are cutting and furious, they’re phrased as questions, implying that the answers might change.

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Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt’s collaboration Siteseeing (At Bay, 167 pages, $25) is the result of a year-long poetic conversation that ranges from Winnipeg to rural Saskatchewan, from root to sky.

Taking place between February 2021 and March 2022, these sharply observed poems bear witness to “climate/ changed” and to pandemic losses. Gordon picks up this theme, that climate and pandemic crises run into one another: “I’m congested, conflating/ extreme weather warnings/ with record test positivity rates,” she writes.

These specific moments in the text encapsulate what Gordon and Schmidt do so well throughout Siteseeing — they don’t look away from these moments that are so difficult to move past, and they carry them as they move toward connection.

“I want it all to mean/ something, the flooding/drought/ of end times,” writes Gordon in response to Schmidt’s view of her pasture: “The pasture looks tired./ I am too. I want the gold/ to mean something.” This search — for meaning, for wonder, for wild turkeys in Wolseley lanes — animates the collection, and the clear-eyed way in which Gordon and Schmidt encounter the world, language and each other makes for lively reading.

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In Vixen (Book*Hug, 72 pages, $20) Sandra Ridley considers the way intimacy and violence are intertwined. Ridley draws on writing about the medieval hunt, torquing its tropes to emphasize the slip between vixen as fox and vixen as woman.

In the fourth section, The Beasts of Simple Chace, Ridley compiles a bestiary of female animals to be hunted. The beginnings of these poems repeat the same refrain, dismissing the uniqueness of each animal. This formulation, in combination with the exhortation to “Take leave of your haunt and hunt her down —// Till nigh she be overcome,” common across all the poems, establish a context wherein cruelty is rampant, and the speaker’s refusal to look away is devastating: “The trembling takes hold. What is difficult is spoken of as impossible. Some creatures. Many creatures. // All creatures are beautiful once they’re gone.”

For all that the speaker in Vixen exposes and understands cruelty in many guises, whether it is imposed on animals or on humans, Ridley’s vision from the outset is bent toward empathy and compassion: “Unto the ends of the earth —/ if an end will come for us, let it befall.// The end will come to pass. // The ends of knives, the ends of staves, the ends of traps.// Imagine that.” Here is hope and challenge: not for a world wherein violence never was, but for a world in which we choose to end it; not for pacification, but for peace.

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.