Tanis MacDonald, Tall, Grass, Girl: poems

 

She larches the woods,
the pond sedges her. 

Back lane brome brushes
her ankle. 

Sun on asphalt,
dandelion juice, 

the iron tang of
a train whanging by at night. 

Wild licorice by the tracks
holds a creosote whiff. 

She breaks trail past
reed grass and twinflower, 

dogwood and stinging
nettle, sow thistle and willow. 

Aspen is and aspen does.
Tall mulleins nod her on her way. 

All those cattails, narrow leaves,
fat velvet, frogs croaking elm, elm, 

burr oak, burr oak, birch, balsam,
mountain ash, sandy shore, 

loon, moose, coyote, girl
crossing a field of foxtails. (“LAST SEEN WITH CROW”)

The latest from Southwestern Ontario poet, writer and editor Tanis MacDonald is Tall, Grass, Girl: poems (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2026), an assemblage of lyric gestures, responses and examinations that stretch out into a kind of book-length lyric sentence. “Ancestors, I was shocked to hear / this craft of woolflesh,” begins the poem “CABLE STITCH,” “this coursing of / wonder past fear into making, news to me / who was encouraged to disregard / my mother’s body, to think of my / birth like a hatching, [.]” The poems stretch into an ongoingness, each piece set as a further step in a lyric document of witness, survival, agency and observation, centred around the author’s experiences through adoption and assault, and attempting to seek a place of safety, healing and survival. “A girl needs / a poem with seams / that can be let out.” MacDonald offers, within the four-page extended “GIRL, INTERRUPTED,” “A lune oughta make / room to go / mad as bald batshit.” In the end, we all need to feel safe, and the poems in this collection directly confront those experiences, amid the choices of others, to seek out how to feel safe once again. “The students are writing exams and I am / thinking of old Woody Allen jokes.” begins the poem “STARLINGS,” “Woody Allen is an old Woody Allen / joke. Woody Allen is an old rape story. // Do we tell old violences so we don’t / have to tell new ones?”

Through Tall, Grass, Girl, MacDonald speaks from the perspective of an adoptee, writing on ancestry, connections and what we might inherit, and what we might choose to inherit. “I was born then whirled away,” she writes, early in the short piece “ADOPTION REEL,” “the offspring to be named later.” A bit further on, writing: “I slipped from hand // to hand like a baby made of soap. / Enough, then. Start again. Accent // on first and third beats. I left / in a hurricane and crossed // the bridge over the fault line.” Both experiences can be entirely upending, the trauma of assault and a feeling of dislocation as an adopted person, and requiring very different approaches to navigating how best to feel grounded and safe from either, let alone both. Through the poems of Tall, Grass, Girl, MacDonald examines, as the back cover provides, “living in the space between belonging and non-belonging, between victimhood and bold survivorship. She makes no apologies and pulls no punches, taking us on a journey through adoption and assault, to subsequent escapes, and eventually, into full-feathered survivor joy.”

Set with prologue—“PROLOGUE: EVERY PURCHASE WILL HELP / A WOMAN OR GIRL IN NEED”—alongside seven cluster-sections of lyrics—“Trail,” “Stutter,” “Bravado Waltz,” “Smithereens,” “Dress Down,” “Girl Rampant” and “Selvage”—the poems connect as extended lyric accumulations: constructed via individual parts that assemble into poems, into sequences, into sections, into a book-length line. Plying shades of the first-person confessional, MacDonald’s poems articulate anger and frustration and escape; they articulate an agency that should be presumed, retaken when needed, and with absolutely no fucks left to give. “our heroine comes from a long line of barren women,” begins the poem “SMALL FIERCE FACT,” “sparky girls who / could and did but never reaped for they had not sown despite all // efforts, our heroine’s mother comes from a line of farm girls who / knew how it worked, but after her wedding wakes to July blood, // then August, and then she is next year country: no yield, no workforce, / without swell or glow, there’s no crying, normal is as abnormal does // when it does it every month for twelve years [.]”