Sadiqa de Meijer, In the Field

 

I lost my notebook.

            This was, for a few days that summer, my distracted answer when people asked me how I was.

            It clearly wasn’t a disaster, I wanted to convince myself, but my body seemed to argue; there was a void in my chest, and I couldn’t relax, repeating my searches until they were senseless compulsions.

            Only some of that discomfort had to do with the possibility of exposure—that someone, anyone, might read my private scribblings. Sure, it was unsettling to imagine eye contact with that individual, to be so inwardly naked, but after those seconds of awkwardness, I would have my notebook back. The universe would resume its semblance of order. (“FOUND”)

 

The latest from Kingston poet (and current poet laureate for that city) Sadiqa de Meijer is the collection of essays, In the Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books, 2025), a sharp reminder of just how good her award-winning alfabet/ alphabet: a memoir of a first language (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] was. You should pick up both books, really, to get a sense of how detailed, how precise, are her examinations of language and being; how, for her, the two are intertwined. The author of two prior full-length poetry collections—Leaving Howe Island (Fernie BC: Oolichan Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and The Outer Wards (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2020) [see my review of such here]—there is such a striking way her first-person prose so quickly allows a reader, with ease and comfort, into not only her own thinking and experience and complexities, but that of the people she encounters, considers, reconsiders and reflects upon. Across nine personal essays, she composes fieldnotes for and through her own experiences, whether searching for a lost notebook, through medical studies, travelling to Amsterdam (the city where she was born), or working as part of a study of life through a particular corner of Southwestern Ontario. As she writes in the essay “In the Field”: “I was working for a professor named Kee. He knew the geology of the city, where there were moraines and buried creeks. He told me that trees hold so many symbiotic bacteria that if their wood and leaves were somehow erased, they would still look like phantoms of themselves.”

 

It is the details that occur through her thinking I’m struck by, offering moments almost as asides that provide the deepest meaning. “I imagine my objections are principled,” she writes of her medical studies, in the essay “Bloodwork,” “rooted in ethics and aesthetics, and then I doubt myself—because the hospital is a collective ruse, a place of faith in the reductive and separate, and I a surrounded by believers. My classmates sound eager to be in the building, mastering its workings, close to doing what doctors do. I begin to wonder if my aversion has other roots.” If reading helps teach us empathy, to understand another’s experience from the inside, I can think of no better example than moving through this particular collection, as de Meijer provides a remarkable example on just how deep, and how detailed, the possibilities.