Kaie Kellough, Interposition

 

beuz i can’t think

in this star-powered new conclusion

this streaming autobiographical noise

in which the protagonist

dissociates & enters

forever as a brand

 

                        & the universe rewards

w/ subscriptions & emojis

 

            i can’t think

until a re-

shaped jawline

emancipates my can-do

& i transform into the wolf

of self-motivation (“to be”)

The latest poetry title from Montreal-based “poet, fiction writer, and sound performer” Kaie Kellough is Interposition (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2026), a book that follows his Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Magnetic Equator (McClelland and Stewart, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Composed as a book-length suite in three extended, expansive, accumulative sections—“to be,” “between” and “betweens”—Kellough blends performance swirls and punctuated language to immediately establish the book’s intentions. “these words declare // who i is,” he writes, near the opening of the first section, “across all platforms [.]” There is a way Kellough’s lyric opens into critical explorations across conversational and visual space, comparable to such as the ongoing works of American poets Jessica Smith and Melissa Eleftherion, M. NourbeSe Philip’s classic Zong (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2008; Invisible Publishing, 2023) [a book I reviewed for The Antigonish Review when it was first appeared, see such reprinted here] or even New York poet Christian Schlegel’s more recent The Blackbird (Brooklyn NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2025) [see my review of such here]. There is something big and stretched in the way Kellough pulls at the lyric, a clear performance element articulating the self amid the climate crisis, data mining and culture wars, and where any individual sense of being, purpose and even reason might sit amid the chaos of all that noise, far too often presented with equal or disproportional weight.

x          never wanted but it happened in spite

of a void of am-                       bition x was raised

by arrivants to over-

come                imperium of doubt                   & do not

 

fixed caste                                heredity alterity &

non-consensual

collective consciousness           & others’ expectations

invaded x & the (“to be”)

 

Working an enormous amount of loose threads, Kellough’s book-length expanse examines and critques anxiety, achievement, culture and chaos, attempting to navigate through the bombardment and into clarity, utilizing the space of the lyric not as an end unto itself—whether witness or document—but a means through and to it.

 

(now i understand that in my poems, this                diegetic contrivance

 

                                                        when the speaker of the poem

 

                        oscillates btwn music               & matter

 

this freedom suite

 

                                    africa brass

 

this contrivance returns like a chorus –

 

 

Laurie D. Graham, Calling It Back to Me

 

Under Russian’s boot,
under England’s boot, 

they sailed off
to become the boot 

of the plains, stamping
out the grasses and trees— 

investment companies
bulldozing the windbreaks, 

filling in the sloughs, flattening
hills and houses, seeding the ditches, 

every arable, pilfered inch— 

the settlement story going sour
in the heat and the haze. (“Toward an Origin Story”)

Edmonton-born Peterborough, Ontario-based poet and editor Laurie D. Graham’s latest, following Rove (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2013), Settler Education (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2016) and Fast Commute (McClelland and Stewart, 2022) [see my review of such here], is the poetry title Calling It Back to Me (McClelland and Stewart, 2026). Composed as a book-length and quartered suite—with extended sequence-sections “Calling It Back to Me,” “The Great-Grandmothers,” “Toward an Origin Story” and “A Good Closing”—Graham writes specifically of maternal lines, “her great-grandmothers’ lives before and after they left their homelands and settled on this continent,” tracing and trailing the stories of women who traded one homeland for another, exploring broken memory, history, geography and genealogy, and the inherent colonial impulse they carried. “Still the urge is for / story. She wants to give.” Graham writes, on the opening page. “A bright yellow moon / rises in her mind. // A small pink curl / of cloud. // No language / for any of it.”

One can argue the length and breadth of Graham’s explorations through poetry, and the book-length poem, have their solid foundations in the prairie long poems of the 1970s—think of Barry McKinnon, Andrew Suknaski, Monty Reid, et al—blending with the archaeological precision and craft of Tim Lilburn or Don McKay, as well as contending with the more contemporary lens of the legacies of colonialism. “Northern Ireland    in the 1920s // and not a word,” she writes, across the expansive second section, a long poem stretched across fragments of visual space. Further along the same thread, offering: “Her eldest daughter teaches her children      her grandchildren // that they came from a place      it appears    they never lived in /// All  her brothers   already here // and cousins    and uncles        then husbands   then her // a siphoning [.]” Through Graham, each subseuqnet collection provides new ways for her to think through histories both intriguing and deeply complicated, rooted in those prairie stretches. Given the length and breadth, the distances, of her work so far, it would be intriguing to catch a selected and new volume of her work, for the sake of articulating a wider overview of her work-to-date. But for now, through Calling It Back to Me, Graham attempts to articulate a people seeking stability amid the upheavals of history, and the benefits of the author’s hindsight; and seeking a language to match with their experiences, too fresh and unfamiliar to quickly do anything but come up short. As the opening section continues:

Edges of the photographs
disintegrating. Names 

on the census misspelled.
Creases erasing the facts 

from the birth certificate.
The town history’s broken spine. 

The story as he told it
in his last years 

from a distance. All this
is coming into my hands. 

A one-word answer
on an immigration form 

becomes our imagined

founding, what we say
about our being here.

Jake Skeets, Horses

 

PART THREE          MEMORIAL

I trace the outline
of horses encased
in hydrated lime
            an offering
to return home
to loam to ground water 

the horses buried
on-site to free up
the creeks and crease of their pasts
their makeup all song
and morning and mane 

here, enshrined
with the memory
of a stock pond
horses buried
thigh-deep in mud
clawing for the first world
for something we left behind

The second full-length collection by Oklahoma-based poet Jake Skeets, a member of the Navajo Nation (and the third appointed as the Nation’s Poet Laureate) is the brilliantly and heartbreakingly devastating collection Horses (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions/Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2026), a title that follows his full-length debut, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions, 2019). As the notes at the back of the collection provide:

In 2018, approximately 191 horses were found dead at a stock pond on the Navajo Nation. The horses were identified as feral horses, wild horses, or free-roaming horses. Stock ponds are used as water stations for roaming livestock in what has been called an arid landscape. The stock pond where the horses were found was near Gray Mountain in Northern Arizona. It had been dry because of the extreme drought the Navajo Nation is facing, caused by decades-long aggression by the United States and the changing climate. The horses were found thigh- and neck-deep in the mud, some horses on top of other horses.

These animals were searching for water to stay alive. In the process, they unfortunately burrowed themselves into the mud and couldn’t escape because they were so weak.
 – Former Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez

The horses were found in a circle, mud caked in their coats. Some horses were found upright as if running. The Navajo Nation, as a response sprayed the horses with hydrated lime to speed up decomposition and buried the horses on-site. Today, the feral horse problem is contributing to the drought conditions of the Navajo Nation.

One horse survived and her name is Grace.

Set with opening lyric, Horses is constructed as a book-length suite in four sections—“HORSES,” “HOOTSO,” “ENTANGLEMENTS 1” and “AND STILL DEER SOFTEN”—writing a collection a dream-land of decolonial meditations on apocalypse through fences and boundaries, pipelines and blockades and dried-up lakebeds, all of which lead back to the book’s foundation: of dead wild horses and climate crises. “there [            ] a long garden,” he writes, mid-way through the collection, “lush / locked, an oasis there / and we [         ] our torsos / touching in the tickseed // never touching though / a wildfire burns along the highway / in our memory of each other / you come closer to the asphalt [.]” Acknowledging a loss amid losses, his is a lyric composed across a hush; composed amid moments held in space. Skeets’ lines are remarkably pointed, composing Horses as a kind of essay-poem around a devastated landscape, writing both a love song to the land and its inhabitants as well as offering warning, elegy and witness. “When we get to the dead horses,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of “FIELD SONG,” “I suppose the wind / is felt, deep blue within the silt of it—when we get to the field, / I close my shutter left open.”

There’s a heft to this collection, writing the legacy of dead horses “mired in mud” seeking water, a narrative encapsulation and elegy around landscape and loss, colonial and climate impact. “In the beginning, breath—erosive slather of wind and vein. / Waters saint the church caught at the throat, / callus, calcium, a bitter tide. The first body bent / into locust into tower : a mountain physics, an early river.” There’s such a sense of the physical landscape articulated through these pages, writing a perspective and a space even through citing their slow erosion. Or, as he writes:

there was a lake here you say
I repeat there was a lake here
as if to at least see my voice touch yours
and you trace my lip with your [                       ] 

there [                                       ] a lake here
and just because there isn’t anymore
doesn’t we mean we don’t feel
the water echo beneath us