Unrau subverts Northland poet’s work

The hand-traced, layered poems in Melanie Dennis Unrau’s latest collection, Goose (Assembly Press, 132 pages, $23), stalk and dance across the page. The poems use Sidney Clarke Ells’ collection of poetry, Northland Trails, as well as his memoirs as source texts, in addition to archival accounts by Indigenous and Métis inhabitants of the North. These poems are an angry, funny, generous intervention into the national mythology.

In the first and third sections, Unrau takes different approaches toward a subversive reading of Northland Trails. Each of the poems in the first section, The Goose, represent a reading of the entire book Unrau traced with specific constraints; the poems in the third section, Contents, are tracings from individual poems.

The poems in the middle section, the tracking line(s), engage directly with archival material. Here Unrau traces the Athabaska River and the unnamed Indigenous and Métis labourers who were harnessed to tracking lines to pull the heavy boats of supplies upstream from the shore, troubling Ells’ frequently repeated account, which casts the trackers as fickle and Ells himself as heroic.

With humour, these poems show the Romantic and heroic aggrandizement with which Ells treated himself to be hollow puffery. “I began to suspect that Ells, who migrated each year between Ottawa and Fort McMurray and who wanted to be seen as a legitimate resident of the north, may have liked to think of himself as a goose.”

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The title poem of katherena vermette’s latest collection, Procession (Anansi, 112 pages, $23) is characteristic of her careful approach to line and thinking. The poem opens starkly: “you are only here/ to honour your ancestors/ and prepare for your children.” Where these lines hew to the left margin, when she almost immediately picks up the thought again the words are more open and “inclusive,” and their placement on the page more spacious and dynamic.

From the heartfelt greetings and invitations in the opening poems, the collection proceeds both celebrating the speaker’s lineage and claiming and understanding her place in it. Near the collection’s end, in girl at café in rain at sunset smoking cigarette with long marble holder writing poetry, vermette structures the poem around a sequence of lines divided with a sharp caesura. From “my heart is broken. long live my heart” to “the Elder has passed. long live the Elder” to “french is dead. long live Michif,” these lines mark a progression from self to family lineage to nation. This procession echoes the sense of expansiveness that characterizes the collection as a whole.

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Jumoke Verissimo’s Circumtrauma (Coach House, 88 pages, $25) is a tour de force that, at the threshold of language and logic, considers the traumatic afterlife of the Nigeria-Biafra War.

The book is structured using a combination of computer code as well as Ifá — a divination practice that operates on a binary system — and a cut-up citational practice using Nigerian war novels to magnify and amplify a multiplicity of voices, as well as the silences that ensnare them.

The opening poem, From Source to Scar, is also a program that establishes an algorithm that magnifies the unresolved nature of war trauma’s afterlife, “Shared history as/ recognition and then fractured.” She ends the program-poem by asking “Does the code of our past ever truly stop running?” before, in a footnote, she reveals the output: “the war ended: 4,000,000 stories still spend blood to live.”

The poems are deft, wise and arresting, and the concluding essay is equally layered and illuminating. “[T]he Ifá Corpus provided both the structural and philosophical foundation for Circumtrauma, its binary logic informing the poems’ form and its emphasis on interpretation mirroring my exploration of the war’s unspoken emotional legacy. Divination, in this context, became a means to read the surrounding wounds, listen for the silent stories, and create a space for a different kind of remembering.”

Thus Verissimo weaves analyses of history, storytelling and divination to outline the poetics that shape the book.

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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.