Leesa Dean, Interstitial

The latest by Krestova, British Columbia writer, educator and mentor Leesa Dean, following the short story collection Waiting for the Cyclone (Brindle & Glass, 2016) and a novella in verse, The Filling Station (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022), as well as a couple of chapbooks, is the poetry collection Interstitial (Sackville NB: Gaspereau Press, 2026), one of a trio of recently-released collections by this new iteration of the legendary Canadian small press. Composed as a lyric of detail, both meticulous and sketched, and incorporating visual elements, Dean quilts her Interstitial with incredible precision across five numbered sections—“I. APOGEE,” “II. TRAPPINGS,” “III. THE DEEPEST KIND OF LISTENING,” “IV. INTERSTITIAL” and “V. PERIGREE”—all wrapped around the illness, loss and aftermath of her late mother. “She’s not your mother anymore,” she writes, to open the short sequence “Brace Yourself,” “my father warned as the hospital doors / flung open to reveal her final ecosystem [.]” At times, she writes her descriptions slant, confronting directly when required and skimming across an interiority, an abstract of lyric, as counterpoint, holding a fine balance between what needs to be said and what can’t be easily held. “I inherited my wildness / from the midnight sun / long,” begins the poem “L’appel du vide,” to open the second section, “lean days in a resource town / where greasy oolichan flashed / beneath the wide-toothed Skeena [.]”

I’m curious as to how a number of her poems throughout sit as block text, as though utilizing a physical constraint on her lines, almost as a kind of containment to push against that very sense of wild, or even to keep certain poems, through the rawness of her subject matter, from falling apart entirely. “She cried the first three months. latched / while sobbing.” begins the short lyric “Firecracker,” “mouth as big as her soul. / woke every hour. didn’t want to miss a / thing. I watched her every move. don’t / fuck up—not sure who I meant. two / years sober then. Still white-knuckling, / saying you saved me baby girl. how do we / quantify our saviors.” The poems of Interstitial directly confront the loss and the aftermath of her mother, the grief of a family, and family secrets that always have a way of making themselves known. It is a book of and around loss, but one of connections made, seeking to unpack and articulate details of her mother’s experience; working to solidify through writing what otherwise might have slipped entirely away. To make solid, and therefore more present, that loss, perhaps, working to unpack threads and speculations around her mother’s direct experience, as the poem “Learning to Walk,” for example, offers: “My mother is released at eighteen / months. She has lived most of her life / in hospital.” It is through Intertidal that Dean allows her mother her own agency, one that wasn’t always present, possible or even acknowledged by those around her, such as she writes as part of the extended sequence “Cripple,” that includes:

What nagymama didn’t say when she betrayed your secrets
is that you survived. You grew and thrived, became a nurse
for sick children and then had two children. The doctors
labelled your body an unfit vessel for childbearing—there
was nothing you enjoyed more than proving people
wrong. This is a trait I have inherited.