Poems on fatherhood playful and poignant

In Dad Era (Coach House, 96 pages, $25), Jordan Abel navigates the various iterations of fatherhood, from the cultural stories and their shadows that proliferate in countless ways to the impact of generational trauma. “A dad is a parent is a human,” he writes in the beginning of the book, and quickly follows that statement with “A dad is garbage is gone.” This rhythm, which he comes back to repeatedly, structures the suite’s movement and Abel’s thinking.

Though the lyric voice is a departure from Abel’s previous poetry, the strength of his conceptual and visual experimentation are also evident in the visual poems threaded throughout. These poems, which also integrate lyric lines, take traditional West Coast Indigenous images and photographs and layer, disintegrate and reincorporate them through the book.

While Abel does mention the effects of residential schools on his family, he is insistent that, “The thing about celebrating Indigenous joy is that/ sometimes people will ask me to put all/ my pain on display even though it’s the joy/ that keeps all this floating along.” The importance of joy to this collection, evident in the love that grounds its subject and the playfulness with which he approaches the language, is structurally reinforced here. The pendulum between joy and pain is arrested in the third line, and joy is held as the through-line.

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David Martin’s latest collection, nightstead (Palimpsest, 92 pages, $22) is part elegy for his brother, who died by suicide, part incantation and part cultural examination of memory. The collection is structurally innovative, intellectually compelling and emotionally gripping.

The silences in this collection add texture to its emotional weight. Early in the collection, the poem Collective is comprised of a list of collective nouns with one exception, “A charm of you.” The singularity of this exception opens a person-shaped space that haunts the collection.

“[L]o/ss/is/me/mo/ry/’s/mo/th/er,” Martin writes to close the book. This question of memory, its relation to imagination and to loss structures the collection as it veers from the formally experimental to the autobiographical lyric. Memory’s the question that animates the continuous line, in which the speaker addresses an absent “you” that crosses the poems in the collection’s first half and creates an explicit link between them: “I didn’t remember that until I saw the photograph, but now I recall it. How much do you truly remember, and how much do I? Do photos contrive memories… ?”

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The poems in Kevin Irie’s Evacuations (University of Alberta Press, 100 pages, $20) confront the injustices of Japanese displacement and internment during the Second World War and its ongoing effects.

The bloodless euphemisms of bureaucratic language collides with human experiences of injustice in a series of erasure poems that form the core of this collection.

In To All Persons of Japanese Racial Origin Now Resident in British Columbia, for example, Irie takes a notice by T.B. Pickersgill (the commissioner of Japanese Placement) from 1945 and proceeds to transform it with various erasures. In the last of these, he writes, “Japanese others/ to remain in Canada/ accept/ dispersal.” Here, the official language is stripped away, leaving a core that holds people responsible for their own oppression, against which Irie writes.

The opening poem, On Reading Joy Kogawa, connects the speaker to their ancestors and past injustices to their current iterations. Kogawa’s poem on the evacuation wakes the speaker “to the fact that their history/ makes mine.” Historical injustices live on in the speaker’s experience of being called a racial slur: “That my parents and grandparents/ must have heard worse,// though they never mentioned it,/ and i never thought// to ask. Wake up, Bok Choy./ Because that’s what I hear.// Not what’s been awakened./ What’s not been put to rest.”

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen’s first collection The Night, The Knife, The River is forthcoming in spring 2027 with At Bay Press.