Notions of value unpacked in verse

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This article was published 23/08/2025 (403 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The poems in Karen Solie’s sixth collection, Wellwater (House of Anansi, 112 pages, $23), consider the question of value — what it is, where it comes from, what it leaves behind — with a characteristically fierce intellectual and poetic rigour.

In Yarrow, Solie uses the botanical structure of the plant, the umbel, as the scaffold for a poem that brings together myth, “old knowledge” and the indignities of modern life. Here, yarrow’s analgesic properties form a conceptual stalk for the poem’s couplets, as well as an ethical framework for the poem’s vision: “though it was Patroclus who used the fernlike analgesic leaves,// hemostatic also and delicately furred,/ to treat the wounds of fallen soldiers. With knowledge comes// that duty.”

Throughout, Solie is concerned with the being of the world and how we come to relate to that being-ness. In these explorations, she upends common assumptions.

Early in the collection, the speaker remembers a conversation she has with her nephew. Here, she expects “a load of nonsense about cartoons,/ trucks, the dog, or the recitation/ of a poorly communicated half-truth,” but instead, she hears a deeper truth about the world, “Triangles, circles, squares, we can make them. But this/ — he held a clod of earth —/ is an accident. Will never happen again.”

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The life cycle of a queen bee is the structuring metaphor of Kim Fahner’s sixth collection of poetry, The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 140 pages, $21).

Fahner opens the book with the fashioning of a new queen. In three tales that mark structural shifts in the text, she charts the cycle of the queen’s life: “Now, well, it’s all about how nothing stays the same,/ and how it’s coming around again.// She kills her sisters, then.”

“The real story of my life is the story of its bereavement,” Fahner writes to open Once. There are many griefs and bereavements that fuel this poem and the book; however, what propels it is Fahner’s playful use of line and language: “I spoke in curses rather than in/ italicized litanies, and I spoke in ancient witch’s spells rather than in rosaries,/ and I spoke in agony rather than in sacramental holies.”

The incantatory rhythm, highlighted by the rhymes within and at the end of the lines, evokes a sense of timelessness.

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In Since I Am Still Here, Susan Wismer sets out the question that propels the speaker in her debut collection, Hag Dances (At Bay, 150 pages, $25). “How will I move through this time before?” she asks in the opening line.

The ambiguity at the end of this question sets the mood for the collection, which travels back and forward in time and which seems to anticipate a movement toward an indeterminate point.

The last two poems in the collection, Hag Dances and Hageography, use language and etymology to lead the speaker into herself. “Hag/ an old woman//Hag/ the overhang at the edge of a cliff// Hagios/ from the Greek, meaning holy,” she writes in Hag Dances. These dances spin into a hageography in which “earth flesh fall away/ swallowed// lakes water/ windlashed.” Here, the speaker observes and takes on some of the storm’s power “as lightning seeks earth/ old woman walks/ home.”

The line break draws attention to home as a place, as well as the speaker’s relation to herself.

Wismer’s poems refract the world in such a way that they prompt reflection beyond the self. In In This Waste, for example, she draws attention to the way “unseeing” is not a passive state; rather, to unsee is to commit an act of violence. “Amidst all winter’s squanders, blustered March days,/ mudded detritus tufts, sodden bits of black fur,/ broken bone, gutted and ruined: dead squirrel.”

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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.