Forest fosters lush, textured language

Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s extraordinary latest collection, Sometimes, Forest (Talonbooks, 87 pages, $20), is a lush, layered, textured invitation into an interconnected web of beings centred on, but not exclusive to, the forest — not a setting or a medium in these poems, but a “co-creator and narrator” with its own interests.

Early in the collection, the speaker urges, “comb lichens, ensorcell chanterelles,” an evocation of witchcraft that threads through these poems, linking relation to the natural world to power to writing. These poems are indeed a kind of magic — Gardiner knows when to let them go, returning them to “entropy for miles around/ and softly unbecomes/ the woods.”

Throughout the collection, Gardiner asks what humans’ relationship with the forest is and, importantly, how it can become more mutual. In Eluvial, the speaker examines the effect she has on the forest. Even as “effluent anger/(…)/ slipstreaming the mycorrhizal/ with mood,” the speaker affirms the calming effect the forest has on her: “a forest bath washes/ little chambers clean/ but what washes the forest.” This turn in the last line away from the speaker’s subjective experience into the forest’s is especially important in the context of the climate crisis.

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Bramah’s Discovery (Nightwood, 270 pages, $27) is a fitting and uneasy conclusion to Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s propulsive and innovative three-part climate change epic series The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns (THOT J BAP), which includes Bramah and the Beggar Boy and Bramah’s Quest.

The volume opens in 2110, with an army of incels marching against the Seed Savers and Resisters to the Consortium while Amal, the beggar boy from the previous volumes, is entrapped in a game of climate chess. Bramah, the time-travelling demigoddess locksmith, is under pressure from without and from within.

“I just want, for once, the story to be about me/ how I got here?/ There’s always time to help others,/ not ever enough for me.” Tasked with rescuing Amal from Al-Rashid’s prison and in search of her own history, public good and private need come into conflict in ways that bring genuine peril, not only because the stakes could not be higher but because the conflict creates circumstances that test Bramah’s relation to her ethical centre: “Let all evil die and good endure.”

The tensions and themes that drive the narrative are amplified through chess notations, songs and rhymes. For example, the chorus of orphans threads through the narrative, punctuating and subverting it: “This is our Bramah, walking upright and free,/ She’s traded in her Pippin file and key,/ Once she was a maker, now she’s a taker” they sing, a comment on Bramah’s role in a violent revolution, before they take up a mantra they repeat throughout the text: “Un coup de dés! Find us, come find us/ It’s just us, W-C-N-S-F!” This acronym for Wounded Child No Surviving Family draws connections to wars and genocides in the present and through history.

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Kaie Kellough’s latest book, Interposition (McClelland & Stewart, 112 pages, $25), is a COVID-era long poem that aims to intervene into online discourse. Here, Kellough remixes the language of social media to “introduce//a fluctuation// a digression that bucks/ up from under the straight line/ deviates into wobbles &/ ruptures &// returns.”

The effect of Kellough’s structure is to crack open the flattening, universal urgency of the doom scroll. He gleans language pertaining to COVID, the climate emergency, war, shopping and more, “bcz whose story? if this isn’t who/ then ? who the virtual protagonist/ how do we ? our footprint,” and calls its imperatives and violences into question.

It’s no small conceptual distance to go from this digital and psychological fragmentation (which is reinforced by the way he scores the page) to “i live/ inside my skin,” but Kellough does so with aplomb.

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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.