Injustices, care system crucially connected

Junie Désil opens her second collection, allostatic load (Talonbooks, 96 pages, $19), by chronicling the health surveillance at her job and in the medical system as well as the effects of that surveillance. She contends with a society that tries “to love each other/ conditionally or for a paycheque/ make something inherently relational/ into something to be consumed like/ a hamburger,” and the oppressive “irony of being in service to the state’s/ offloading and feminization of labour.”

The speaker’s experiences of individual and bodily and psychic harms are inseparable from the systemic harms of the climate crisis, anti-Black racism and colonialism: “i mention birds in the same breath as racial trauma. i remember finding an injured bird, its tiny chest heaving and fluttering and beating — wildly — that’s how my chest felt my whole life. i keep being told to just breathe even when pollutants and unshed grief battle to expectorate themselves from my lungs,” she writes in breath/breathe.

The resolution of the collection is necessarily uneasy. The speaker’s vision for reciprocity, relationality and restoration, for care and justice in the broadest and most genuine senses, comes to ground on the systems she’s working against.

The collection leaves off with an abiding tension between “the irony of being prescribed stolen nature reserves” to find respite and the lessons the speaker learns from the land: “this soil i grasp teaches me daily, regulates my nervous system, catches what leaks as gratitude despite the harrowing we encounter, despite the harrowing i’ve put this soil thru.”

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

● ● ●

Extinction and crises form the background against which Farah Ghafoor’s urgent debut, Shadow Price (Anansi, 128 pages, $23) is set. Here the speaker considers the “market value that is inferred and not directly observed” of systems that, seemingly inevitably, structure the current world.

Ghafoor takes these systems apart from the seams of their grammar. In Plot she uses a prose line to explore the ways in which the stories we tell about the world. “In my safehouse, I am looking for a metaphor to convey this,” she writes, “I am not a storyteller — too prone to knotting the beginning to the end — but where there is plot, I know there must be a narrator.” Ghafoor challenges herself to sever the structures that insist that, to be told, a narrative must have a (human) narrator and must, therefore, centre human interests.

One of the ways Ghafoor seeks to lessen capitalism’s power is to make explicit the inferred price of ordinary choices that the market makes easy.In Mercy, for example, Ghafoor writes, “I knew I would become a murderer/ the moment I hesitated” to release the first fish she caught.

This is not merely a moment of self-indictment; rather, it’s a kind of answer to a question she asks early in the collection: “But what do I know of suffering?” That is, the shadow price of living in the world as it is, is paid in humanity.

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

● ● ●

Jessica Hiemstra’s illustrated long poem Blood Root (Icehouse, 112 pages, $22) reckons with the speaker’s relation to her family and the stories she’s inherited. “I was given a stolen story/ to understand who I am// what if I become/ my mother// my grandmother/ her grandmother.”

Hiemstra is specifically concerned with unpacking the religious lies originating in the Dutch Reform Church, which, given the Netherlands’ history in Indonesia, is also a history of whitewashing colonial crimes.

These stolen stories, and the misunderstandings they engender, live on in the present, and the work of this poem is not only to untangle them but to unsettle the expectations of comfort in the pursuit of justice. “I want to put flowers on graves/ of people my ancestors brutalized//I learn the word for turtle/ in Ojibwemowim// a grave can be desecrated with flowers.”

Here she refuses the redemption arc of reconciliation, but in so doing opens the door to a transformation: “I’m trying to transform/ into a cormorant before I die// But I’m a woman transforming/ into a woman.”

Buy on mcnallyrobinson.com

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