Powerful poems rife with rage, desire

The poems in Saulteaux, Cree and Métis poet Brandi Bird’s second collection, Pitiful (Anansi, 112 pages, $23), are anything but. Powerful and vivid, filled with rage and desire, they chronicle and respond to the speaker’s eating disorder, psychiatric hospitalization and survival. Among the many violences the collection confronts is the prevailing whiteness in the cultural image of eating disorders and how that erases others who suffer.

In Post-Memory, a longer poem set in a psychiatric ward, the speaker reckons with the way eating disorder treatment robs patients of agency: “I am not a citizen here. I am/ not allowed to leave. The nurses/ won’t let me forget it.” These short sentences, and the mid-sentence line breaks, evoke a sense of reluctance and coercion.

The coercive nature of treatment isn’t the only source of disorientation. Equally disorienting is the estheticized, child-like white stereotype, which makes eating disorders culturally palatable, against which the speaker is measured. When another patient asks for advice on vomiting, the speaker refuses. “Really I don’t/ want competition from a white girl./ Her sadness/ is always prettier/ than mine.” This alienation and disorientation are countered, for the speaker, in poetry, fragments of which cover her walls. “I recognize myself in poetry./ The idea that I belong here/ The surprise that I am alive,/ a breath.”

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Jennifer LoveGrove’s fourth collection of poetry, The Tinder Sonnets (Book*hug, 96 pages, $23), works against the cultural invisibility of middle-aged women by insisting on the speaker’s desire, point of view and presences.

These sonnet triptychs operate on the tension between desire for connection and the impediments thereto, including ghosting, gendered violence and the very technologies that ostensibly enable connection. In the opening sequence, LoveGrove considers the “secret signals,/ quiet signs” that have been normalized to counter gendered violence.

The way LoveGrove compresses language and remixes image in these tryptichs add to their confessional tone. In the first section of Orgasm is not the goal, he said, and I rolled my eyes, she writes, “It is my pattern’s ghost,/ my f–king father. He is online now./ For four cold months, we spoke daily, how can —/ Tying stems of anise together, he’s/ happy when I laugh, when I come.” Where the above lines are the volta of the first sonnet, they are reordered to open the second one, “Tying stems of anise together, he’s/ my f–king father.” Here, the remixed lines draw connections between past experience and present relationships.

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The debut by Lasänma (Mariah MacDonald), Spruce to cedar (Brick, 112 pages, $24), is a narrative meditation on the question of belonging and survival in a colonial context. Set in Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Vancouver, the poem is a testament to the work required to survive the dislocations that result from generational trauma.

Lasänma sets out part of the work of understanding generational trauma early in the poem. The effects of colonial violence are not abstract, and live on in the beliefs and behaviours of people in previous generations. After a litany of things “when you’re a child/ you don’t understand,” which culminates in the speaker’s father’s visible distress over his traumatic experiences in residential school, she asks, “how do you tell a child/ that if they were born in a different time/ they would have been taken?/[… .]/ how do you tell a child/ that you were born in a different time?”

Weaving the speaker’s past and present, along with reflections on those experiences and her family’s stories and letters from her adult self to her past, the structure of this poem arcs toward self-reconciliation. To herself in 2013, Lasänma writes, “because you were able to make it through such hardships at such a young age, i know i can make it through rough times. when those dark moments creep into my mind (…) i know i have resilience within me because you survived, so i’ll survive now.”

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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 the fall of 2026.