Family and community knit together in verse

Zane Koss’s long poem, Country Music (Invisible, 152 pages, $23), is concerned with the intricacies of storytelling.

Rooted in the speaker’s upbringing, the book opens with the request that someone “tell the cougar story” and proceeds to chart this and other family stories’ circulations, and their functions in creating kinship.

Koss celebrates the storytellers’ voices and vernaculars and the specifics of its connection to the speaker’s rural, working-class roots. This connection, however, does not go uninterrogated in the speaker’s current life: “Kate asks me,/ when are you going to stop identifying as blue-collar/ (… .)/ I said,/ when i stop feeling like…”

The silence at the end of this incomplete sentence is full of stories and connection, an affiliation the speaker can’t easily give up, especially in the context of the myriad ways the speaker is made unwelcome in the life he currently leads, as when a fellow grad student “whose/ aunt had that famous/ french theorist over for dinner parties” tells a story that curtails the humanity of rural working class people: “wordless I left the bar blind with an anger I still feel/ a decade later/still feel.” The diction and the way the thought breaks off evokes the speaker’s response to having his class position called into question.

These stories, knitting family and community together as they do, also serve to sever tellers and listeners from their location and its history: “never in relation to the land except/ in opposition// an opposing force/ that must be overcome// a relationship that is rooted/ in a history// in a particular history.”

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Early in his debut collection, All Wrong Horses on Fire That Go Away in the Rain (NeWest Press, 100 pages, $21), Sarain Frank Soonias writes directly into an overwhelming intergenerational trauma: “then a dark told me/ your child is mine,” he writes to open Kill the Indian, Spare the Child.

What follows in that poem, and in the collection itself, is an approach to writing about trauma that exposes the perpetrators as “an army of wendigo/ (… .)/ you only bring death because you are dead/ you bob and float bob and float// you cannot see you’re already gone.” This exposure coexists with strategic refusals that protect those who suffered the original traumas as well as their descendants.

Soonias uses these strategic, protective silences intermittently throughout the collection. In Winona, for example, the speaker introduces a song “about a girl i knew, and man, you talk about tuning the bad out.” Here, the deliberate refusal to tell the story protects both the speaker and the girl he’s talking about.

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Adam Haiun’s innovative debut, I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid (Coach House, 80 pages, $25), asks what our relation to computers and, in a turn from the usual question, asks what it is these digital networks and tools want from humans.

Written in the voice of a digital speaker, without using generative software, Haiun’s long poem uses a multifaceted, fragmented vision of digital expression to argue for more care and attention to the way we use technology as a repository for our darkest impulses.

“And you are telling me again that/ the network is not humanity,” the speaker asserts. “There exists no pearlescent spectrum between existence and non-existence.”

The aphoristic style of the opening pages gradually intensifies and fragments, as lines begin to cross vertically through the text, repeat and, in greyscale, underwrite the page.

The images in the text are particularly striking in their organicness. The digital network sees itself in terms a person might: “My beliefs are responsive as a body. And they are adaptive as a body. Can they not be made to play the role.”

What emerges is an expansive, fragmentary imagination of what digital desire might be, “not the apocalypse I thought I was,” but “little apple seeds/ feeding/ i n t h e fabric of/ your life.”

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