Anna Veprinska, Bonememory

 

I rode an escalator into a Kyiv
metro station just before emigration
in the summer of 1993. I remember
because it was my first escalator,
my first metro station. Now,
on the news, I watch Ukrainians huddle
in the metro station, birth children
from the privacy of the womb
into war’s pubic, hairy arms. Every year
since turning fifteen, I have longed
to return to Ukraine, if only
to lay stones on the graves
of my grandparents. What Ukraine
will be left for me, or for those
who still call it home?
Who, now, will witness
my grandparents’ graves? (“Vignettes for Ukraine”)

The full-length poetry debut by Calgary-based poet and academic Anna Veprinska is Bonememory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2025), a collection of first person lyric observations dealing with conflict, heartbreak and intimate loss. As the back cover of the collection writes: “Memory is stored in the body. Memory sprouts in families and is transmitted from one generation to the next. Memory imprints at the level of bone.” This is a book of questions, and prayer, composed as poems with clear, sharp edges that write of generations, distance and the body, working through losses deeply felt, including that around immigration, colonialism, chronic illness and other upheavals. “Gravesite / suggests the dead are a site to behold,” she writes, as part of the poem “A goose lays eggs on the side of a highway,” “and aren’t they?” Further on, the poem “Testimony” offers: “Somewhere / there is a mouth generous // with opening. / Each lip stirs // in service of its own / secrets.”

Referencing the discovery of unmarked graves on multiple sites across Canada of former residential schools in the poem “Shoes,” she offers: “How much of this country is an unmarked grave?” She ties these recently-held memorials and acknowledgments to similar memorials at the Auschwitz museum, writing: “What comes from the reification of metaphor?” She writes of pain, and the bewilderment of patterns, repeating, all of which is held in the body. “Empathy,” the same poem concludes, “the lie with whom wee sit making small talk / until decorum dictates we can depart. / 215 Indigenous children. Makeshift memorials / of children’s shoes coast to coast. / How much of this country is an unmarked grave?”