Hannah Karpinski, Lateral Sway

Words among friends are gestural. I reach towards what I mean to say and am met before I touch it, understood in my halfway expression. That top I like gestures at something unique to each speaker, yet instantly recognized regardless of who asks.

Language among friends blooms with paralinguistic potential—I don’t need to speak to be understood. I communicate with my body, my nonverbal sounds, the pressure of a touch, a meaningful raise of my eyebrows, a long look. Every action that implicates an other is expressive in its intent. When I wash all the dishes in a shared space, I am saying to the other, I know you are busy—here’s one less thing on your plate. When I wake up to a half-full pot of coffee with my name on it, I understand it as a gift of time. The other knows my routine and simplifies it by extending something of their own. (“Can I borrow that top I like?”)

The full-length debut by Toronto poet Hannah Karpinski is Lateral Sway (Montreal QC: Metatron, 2026), a book-length suite of extended lyrics, lively first-person gestures, intimacies and observations around memory, climate change and queer desire. “there is something in the air all summer / how else do you explain the static,” writes, as part of the extended lyric “forecast,” “as everything inevitably cools, the dipper / dives into the horizon & we say goodbye / like the last time [.]” Moving between poems with line breaks to extended prose blocks, Karpinski’s stitched fragments write on love, loss and longing, writing out the intimate underpinnings of her lyric gestures. Her heart is on display, but never recklessly so, even despite herself, writing through and around the summer possibilities of youth. Summer love, both romantic and platonic, in all that might bring, but a wariness as much as there is hope. Later in the same poem, offering: “these days belong to the present, then / the past, loops around & belong / to the present again—& they find you / one ear against the pavement / as close to the Earth as you can be [.]”

As her author biography describes her work: “Diving into intimate personal archives and collective memory, she writes about queer friendship and queer desire.” Karpinski’s poems might hold that as their foundation, but the poems are broader, more expansive than that particular tag-line might suggest, writing love, labour and grief, and the immediate grief of reacting to club shootings, such as the poem “laps,” that includes:

when I hear 5 killed in Colorado I want to Uber you to my work & bury
            my face in your neck
when I hear 49 killed in Colorado I’m at work too & you
            are still on the horizon of my life
how do we keep going? I miss you, I’m sick
            of this labour of performing grace, of penning people to poems,
            of asking the most ridiculous question       over & over: 

Would you like your receipt?

To be young and queer is to negotiate between such poles, from the usual arrays of love, desire and carefree optimism to a gut-wrenching fear of violence that no body anywhere should have to endure. Not a wariness, perhaps, but a sense of unease, that leans occasionally into dread, during such moments. Despite this, Karpinski clearly chooses to live on the side of optimism: “I still measure my life in summers,” she writes, as part of the extended fragment-sequence “laps,” “still loosen / my bathing suit & dive / off the highest rocks first [.]” This is such a smart, serious, joyful and enduringly thoughtful text, threading a lyric with elements of the first-person essay/memoir, one that rewards with multiple readings, and displays such delight in her line, in her engaged lyric. Further to the extended piece “Can I borrow that top I like?,” as Karpinski writes:

Clothes, too, have a language, a life, and “each garment,” for Anne Boyer, “holds in it hours.” We call first dibs on garbage bags stuffed with donation items because those bags are full of time, of dormant memory. Clothes are a shared skin; putting them on, we brush against each other. When we wear that top we are back at that party, back at the beach, we are about to eat sandwiches and drink beer in the park.