Lubrin’s elegy awash with grief, tension

In The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem (McClelland & Stewart, 120 pages, $25), Canisia Lubrin turns to the elegy, attending to the form’s images — namely, rain and its aftermath — to chart an emergence into grief. Under Lubrin’s attentive and testing gaze and in her singular voice, the elegy feels at once new and timeless.

Water marks time in this long poem: “is it time again for rivers wounding down the vital pulse of undoing/ death,” she writes. Lubrin’s attention at once holds the fleetest of moments, brief as the falling of a drop of rain, and the accumulation of personal and cultural histories.

From the opening of the book, rain begins to accrue a series of images and metaphorical resonances, rivers and umbrellas, shelter and growth, movement and mothering. “(W)e could dance —/ the scent of our open hearts blanketing the small village/ of all these singing things you bring to your lips, scuffling, now, mother,/ I am damp grassland.”

Lubrin wrestles throughout the poem with the tension between distance and the immediacy of grief. While early in the poem, distance seems an impossibility — “the child you were can reappear while we are/ distance seeking distance” — by the last movement of the poem “distance is the thing you least expect will mother you.”

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The conversational, digressive style of Fenn Stewart’s long poem Women & Roosters (Book*hug, 80 pages, $23) builds tension across the book. Among the ways Stewart builds that tension is by playing ostensible opposites off one another: Women & Roosters operates in the ground between autobiography and speculation, between fear and cockiness, between the city and the woods, between the colloquial and the literary.

Midway through the poem, Stewart breaks the prose line for only the second time: “walking, we’re in time and out of it/ in joint and out of it// our time itself is out of joint.” The shift from a prose line to a free-verse line, which Stewart uses intermittently throughout the poem, draws the digressiveness of the poem into sharp focus.

Taking its title from Galen’s assertion that “all animals are sad after sex except women and roosters,” Stewart’s poem concerns itself with broadly held anxieties such as climate change, motherhood and gendered violence, as well as close observations of language.

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Isabella Wang’s second collection, November, November (Nightwood, 108 pages, $20), weaves a taut, delicate fabric of attentiveness, imagination and experience that honours Phyllis Webb’s life and work as well as the web of relations that nurture the poet through grief and illness. Spanning four Novembers (and one December), the collection creates a space of grief and healing.

The one prose poem in the collection, Prayer on an Operating Table, uses the long line broken by colons to evoke “the cognitive disassembly” of the speaker’s illness and surgery. Here, Wang foregrouns the uncertainty of catastrophic illness discoursively and formally. However, within that disjunctivenes, Wang creates a steadying tension by returning to invocations of love both to start stanzas and within them: “love the loveable moments : and grief that runs after :”.

November, November is a collection that centres community. This is most explicit in the final poem, More Imperfect Sestina, where Wang “choreographs the perfect/ (…) music of this life/ our hearts” by citing a group of writers and theorists, weaving conversation and observation seamlessly within the cited lines. This book, and this poem, are a fitting homage to Webb and to the other writers, whose work and presence are such sustaining companions.

The poems, too, are dispatches to an unknown future, one wherein the speaker imagines herself vis-a-vis unknown poets: “let’s hope younger generations/ will see our work/ unfinished refuse our poetries// in the margins of their own/ world-making energized coalition// there is room.”

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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.