12 or 20 (second series) questions with Norma Dunning

Norma Dunning (PhD) [photo credit: Carina Lamarche, Details Photography Studio] is a Padlei Inuk writer, professor and grandmother. Tainna (The Unseen Ones) received the Governor General’s Award for Literary Fiction in 2021, and Kinauvit? (What’s Your Name?) was shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2023. Her debut, Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (2017), received the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and multiple other awards. She has also published two collections of poetry to acclaim. All her books have been translated into French. Dunning teaches at First Nations University of Canada and lives in Regina, SK.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book is titled Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (2017 UAP) and Annie taught me too many things! Mainly about copyright law and how it is important for an author to stand up for their words. I always say, “If you don’t love what you have written, and I mean really love what you have written – nobody else will either.” There’s truth in that statement.

My writing will always focus on Inuit and how Inuit lives are lived within Canada. Inuit are the smallest Indigenous population in Canada with a total of 70,545 as our population. Around 20,000 live outside of the northern land claims areas or south of 60. Inuit are also first in all the statistics that nobody else wants. First in poverty, food insecurity, substance abuse, overcrowded housing, first in teen suicide and poor health.

 I am beneficiary of Nunavut, as are my three middle-aged sons. When an Inuk lives outside of a northern context our lives become a curiosity to the rest of mainstream. I’ve met many young Inuit who hesitate to identify as Inuk because they are living in a southern city/town. I like to remind them that we are Inuit no matter where we stand.

Over time and with the publication of seven books – 2 short story collections, 2 poetry collections, 2 children’s books (forthcoming in fall of 2026 and the second one in 2027) and my first novel Naoyak releasing in Sept of this year I feel as though my confidence in my work has grown. What I publish becomes my legacy but we do not see the fruits of our legacies until the next generations are doing better in terms of education and improved mental & physical health. My aim is to help those who are waiting to come to us.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry for me has more to do with rhythm, how does the meter used in a poem create the point the poem is making? I always hear the rhythm in someone’s voice before I hear their words. Poetry allows for the beat, the way a voice carries a word to become the focus. Performance is key in poetry and there is a certain poetic magic that occurs when it all comes together.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Writing is only rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. I’ll write a couple pages one day and pat myself on the back for being brilliant and the next day get up and rewrite it all over again. I think about my writing for a long time before I put anything down onto a page. It has to percolate inside of me for months/years and then I can write it.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love readings. I have to read to the audience in the same way that I hear it in my head. It has to be exact and knowing when to pause and for how long – that’s key. I think it’s a gift to be asked to read publicly.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I think all writing is political. What I find amazing is how, in my head, I’m addressing something that is a social concern or disparity, yet the audience will take it in differently – that’s when I think – OK – what did I do wrong? Or I will be thankful for how someone else saw my work in a way that I could never dream of!

6 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

We live in such negative times, in a world of war and hate and anger and everyone has a cause that they do not own but will scream about. I find the news/media is exhausting right now. I think in our present times that the role of the writer is to bring calm and laughter – that is my hope for Naoyak, I hope she makes someone giggle and forget the negativity for a moment.

7 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I think it goes one way or the other – either I have to tell myself that ‘this is how a non-Indigenous person sees this’ or I can get grouchy over it all and think “Editor, inform yourself about Inuit before you start to tell me I’m wrong!” There are very few Indigenous editors and I make use of the Padlei Inuktitut dialect in my work because I think Canada needs to hear/study more Indigenous languages overall and when I have a non-Inuk editor saying that I made use of my dialect incorrectly – oh boy – now I’m ready to go!

8 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I am with the Indigenous Studies faculty at the First Nations University of Canada and I carry a heavy teaching load. I find that when reading week/Christmas/spring break comes along – that’s when I can really focus and write my own stuff. I cannot say I have an exact routine because of how my own career of teaching gets in the way.

9 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I’ve written about consulting a First Nations Elder and telling her about the amount of writing/researching that I was doing. I was at the beginning of my PhD work and I talked about being overwhelmed and burdened and basically I was just feeling stressed and sorry for myself. I asked her how to manage it all. There was a long pause as there often is when speaking with an Elder and then she looked at me and said, “Go clean your toilet!” So I thought I had made a mistake in how I had spoken to her and asked her to repeat. “Go clean your toilet!” and I said, “Really?” and she said – you have to do something normal when you’re stuck so clean your toilet, go for a walk, do some laundry…” Best advice I’ve ever received.

10 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Homemade bread baking in the oven. My folks had six kids, and my mom baked all the bread/buns for the next week every Saturday morning – she was up well ahead of anyone and taking care of us was her priority. I miss her. I miss the smell of homemade bread baking in the oven.

11 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Travel to Portugal – I was invited to a lit fest there and then the pandemic came along. I still would love to travel there.

12 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

13 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I always wrote but publishing was not the end goal. The end goal was to write and complete what I was writing and working on. I didn’t publish until I was 58 and now, I won’t stop publishing! Values change when grandchildren come to you and their lives carry more importance. My job now is to publish and publish and hopefully create a better world for them meaning, eliminating structural racism and the barriers inside of institutions that set Indigenous students up for failure. How do I achieve that – primarily through what I write. I can couch truth into fiction and people will think about it far more than if I’d published a scholarly paper or book.

14 - What are you currently working on?

I have a poetry collection that is humming in my head right now. I’ve only written about 40 pages so far but it is a collection that looks at being an Indigenous prof, teaching Indigenous-based material and the many reactions of the students. I like what I’ve written so far on it – it will get there – meaning completion in time!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sarah Louise Garrido, faithful error: poems

 

NOW

Now the hardest part: exquisite second bloom,
the roses suddenly reviving. 

I turn to show you another
sunset trembling the sky
into fiery orange, and bright pink, 

sunset I want to put in your eye. 

Open the sockets again,
see the things I see. 

But the phone rings by mistake.
Onslaught of dust, stacks of belongings,
you in the chair, now not, a missing
litany of questions, driving soundlessly by the static sea. 

The hardest part does not cease, but lessens by danger.

Now: sparrows swooping into any here without you,
now not knowing what you would finally say. 

I was curious to see San Francisco Bay-area poet and creative director Sarah Louise Garrido’s full-length poetry debut, faithful error: poems (Fort Collins, CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2026), an assemblage of first-person observational narratives that occasionally lean into the metaphysical. “Joy withers away from the sons of man.” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “THE BIRDS HAVE NEVER FAILED ME, PART 1,” “All that’s left is this happiness I have // here with you. All I’ve ever wanted. / Of course I want this. // We don’t know what we want. / Rains come, and we rejoice.” Arranged in four numbered sections—“WANT FOR NOTHING,” “FEEL FREE,” “FOR THE TAKING” and “A FRUIT COMPELLED”—her titles set themselves as poem-anchors, solidifying a narrative that might not wander per se, but moves free along the ground laid down by that title-tether, stretching out and through, but held to each poem’s signpost.

One might suggest this a book of perspectives, set in lyric narratives, Garrido writes of questions and attention, sure, in day-book journal poems perpetually composed around and towards an unseen “you” against the negotiations and interiorities of this nameless narrator. Through Garrido’s poems, there is always a perspective being offered; a speaker, and someone external being spoken to. Not merely declarations or documented thoughts but a kind of directed speech. Even the opening of the rhetorical lyric of “THE COLD LORD,” that begins: “O lord, / if you would but bruise, / batter my body / under the mass of stars, // I’d know you are.” It is as though each of these poems, the narrator requires another character for the sake of counterpointing her perspectives and narratives, such as the poem “YOUR LOSS” begins, opening:

Absence of birdsong in your backyard,
cloud strands not quite making it
into any form. A year of unrealizeds. 

For example, my daughter cannot swim;
the last time she tried was before everything shut down,
my swelling body and her baby-fat arms under the moon. 

My son does not understand
the look on your face, your words. 

Waving at your husband
through the glass, I’m at a loss, 

your loss. A year of windows,
trapped behind solid surfaces—
nothing to do but wait
for you to emerge beyond skin, 

taking on light, finally
the form you always were.

 

Spotlight series #123 : Suzanne Zelazo

The one hundred and twenty-third in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Canadian-American writer, editor, and educator Suzanne Zelazo.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard, Montreal poet Misha Solomon, Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith, American poet and asemic artist Terri Witek, Ottawa-based freelance editor and writer Margo LaPierre, Ottawa poet Helen Robertson, Oakville poet Mandy Sandhu, New Westminster, British Columbia poet Christina Shah, poet, critic, curator and former publisher Geoffrey Young, Calgary poet Anna Veprinska, American expat poet in London Katie Ebbit, Brooklyn poet Nada Gordon, Kingston poet Jason Heroux, Vancouver poet Scott Inniss, Lethbridge-based Brazil-born poet Carlos A. Pittella, Toronto-based Palestinian and Iraqi writer Hajer Mirwali and Calgary artist, poet and musician Kevin Stebner!
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Chath pierSath

Chath pierSath was born in Battambang, Cambodia, in 1970 and immigrated to the United States at the age of ten. His writing has been featured in prominent anthologies, including Prayers for a Thousand Years (HarperOne, 1999) and Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors, edited by Dith Pran (Yale University Press, 1997). His most recent poetry collections are Echoes Lost to Wind (Carbonated Press, 2024) and On Earth Beneath Sky (Loom Press, 2020).

He resides in Bolton, Massachusetts, where he lives and works on a family farm. His creative practice—both in poetry and visual art—centers on themes of memory, rural labor, and the meditative quiet of agrarian life.

1 — How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book was actually After (Abingdon Square, 2009), written in the form of letters. For example, "Letter to My Mother," "Letter to My Father," etc., as a way of imagining what I would say to them individually had they lived to see me grow up. I worked on it for a very long time, but didn’t know where to send it until a friend who was starting a small press took an interest. This first book of letters was very affirmative and inspiring. I have never stopped writing since.

When On Earth Beneath Sky came out, I was even more proud of my accomplishment. I had sent to the editor a very big stack of prose and poems. Then, he asked me to reduce it to about a hundred pages. After farming daily, I would dive through hundreds and thousands of pages in tears, wondering how I could have written that much over the years as a non-native English speaker. I was spilling out my guts, my memory dumping onto the page as a way of talking to myself, trying to understand my place in the world, in nature, and so on.

After deals a lot with Cambodia, the aftermath, the migration, and what I wanted to tell my parents and siblings—like letters that could be sent to them from the United States. Back then, Cambodia was still closed to the world.

2 — How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I came to the US at the age of ten. One of the ways I could learn new English words was to write Haiku—five-seven-five syllables. It taught me how to count. I started writing rhymed poems in high school because I hadn’t read Walt Whitman then. When I won a poetry contest, I received a hundred dollars, which felt so heavy inside my pocket. I was in tears spending part of the one hundred dollars for a hamburger at McDonald's.

Poetry was short and easy. It was something I could finish, as opposed to starting with fiction or a memoir, like a few Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge Genocide did. I just wrote about my life in the US.

On On Earth Beneath Sky and Echoes Lost to Wind, people expected me to write a childhood narrative under the Khmer Rouge, but I didn’t. I wrote about Cambodia after the UNTAC-monitored democratic elections. The aftermath was full of struggle and hardship. I wrote about love and sex growing up in the US. I wrote about nature, and the farm in Bolton, MA.

I chose the healing narrative rather than, “I am a survivor” of a genocide.

3 — How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

First, I usually think of an overarching title or theme. Let's say I want to write about man against nature. I would usually come up with the title for my manuscript, and then I just go at it every day—one poem a day, just free writing. Once I feel I have all the poems, then I go through the process of culling tells and abstracts, or I combine short poems into one. I will organize the poems into thematic breaks until I feel satisfied, maybe after a third or fourth revision.

4 — Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I usually try to work on an entire book from the beginning. Within that book frame of mind, poems will come, maybe while I am thinning peaches or putting seeds into the soil.

5 — Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Yes, I love to read. I enjoy reading when there’s interaction with the audience—asking questions or offering an understanding or an interpretation of the poems I read.

6 — Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I usually start with a certain observation and see what tensions I can put forth, what questions I can answer, and what discomfort I can absolve through words as images and metaphors, stream of consciousness, and so on. One of the biggest questions I have is: why are humans such menaces on earth? Why this repetitive form of competition? Why war? Why race? What’s the point of life and death?

I ask a lot of "why?" Where I was born, I wasn’t told to ask why. Just accept the way it is. Therefore, I became a *why?" man..

7 — What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think we don’t have a culture of readers with an intellect like twenty or thirty years ago. The internet has co-opted our brains. Our intelligence is facing a global pandemic of obesity. Brain tumors and dementia are on the rise. The culture of forgetting has infested our bone marrow, clogging our bloodstream with literary porn. So much sensationalism. But I am all for the greater flow as part of the human condition, struggling with how to live, where and what to be or become.

8 — Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I really need an outsider to read my stuff. I am not so sure of my English. I still need an editor to point out tells and abstracts, and whether this poem goes well with that. Editing my own work is my weak point. I need someone else to read it with a fresh pair of eyes.

9 — What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

A friend said I write best about what I know. For example, I know hunger. I know about war. I know how I became an orphan. I know my own body, the pulses of my own heart. "Write about that," she said.

10 — How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to painting)? What do you see as the appeal?

I think the two art forms complement each other well. When I write a poem, I have to closely see the image that I intend to paint. Only, in visual art, you can be abstract. In a poem, only a limited amount of the abstract can work in context. I use the visual to inform the poem; the poem to manifest the visual.

11 — What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write on my iPhone, using Google Docs. The moment I get up, I write something. Sometimes I get up at two or three in the morning to write. I keep a notebook, a pen, and the phone next to my pillow. Often I write in the dark into a notebook like doing a blind contour drawing. While farming, I carry my phone around so when I think of something—even a line that leads to a larger piece—I can connect all the dots.

12 — When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I paint, or I smear colors on canvases or a piece of wood. I’ll do a collage, or simply wait for the muse to flirt for a kiss.

13 — What fragrance reminds you of home?

The Asian pear blossom that smells like semen or a condom, or a rotting sewer—this scent of sex in the air. Because I used to live as a child close to the village brothel, where one of my brothers soldiered his way into manhood, buying sex with his well-polished rifle.

14 — David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I used to read a lot, but now, I can’t even finish a book. Sometimes when I am stuck, I will read a poet laureate like Louise Glück or the father of free verse, Walt Whitman, or Robert Frost’s nature poems. Or, if I fall in love, I go for Pablo Neruda (but instead of the body of a woman, I write about the body of another man).

15 — What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

When I was in high school, I read Hemingway because he was very handsome, and his sentence structure was short and to the point. Then I came upon Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, so when I think of a manuscript, I begin organizing poems like leaves, like a stream flowing out into the ocean.

Right now, I am reading Map by Wisława Szymborska. I think she’s also a poet laureate. Laureates write about simple, ordinary things with big questions and thematic vastness, full of heartthrobs, heart-strung

16 — What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I want to become a poet laureate. I want to write poems that wow. When a reader eyes my words, their tongue drops to the floor like a dog panting, dripping with awe.

17 — If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I wanted to be a ballet dancer like Baryshnikov. I wanted to fly my body out of gravity. Then, I wished I had gone to medical school to have a steady job and income, just chilling and helping other people. Furthermore, I want to become a novelist like Joyce Carol Oates.

18 — What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

To stay sane and focused. To discover new ways of saying the same thing. Everything in life as of now has been said and done. What more can you invent? Except the things that are done by you. I am my own voice, and knowing I have a voice feels pretty good.

19 — What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. I also saw the movie.

20 — What are you currently working on? 

I just finished a manuscript called Cracks Mended Gold. I completed a novella, finally, called The Story of a Deaf Mute. I haven’t sent it to any publisher yet. I just got another title for another manuscript called Improper Proportion, which looks at the intelligence of animals compared to that of man’s.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Therese Estacion, Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability

Pause. Replay. The amputee walks up the hill in slow motion. Pause. Replay. She does a somersault into the water. Pause, repeat. Pause, repeat again. They snowboard down a mountain.

While I was in the hospital, I scanned the internet for inspiration. Hoping to find photos of amputees living the way everyone lives on the internet, displaying their lives for public consumption freely. Warm smiles, wide-eyed. Wet and shiny. Opened, like a can filled with cream.

Zooming in on their prosthesis, zoom in drowsily envisioning what I would look like with their prosthetic legs on. Feel their freedom and excitement. Their flesh on my flesh. (“Inspiration Porn”)

I’d been looking forward to going through Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2026), the second full-length title by Toronto writer and teacher Therese Estacion, following on the heels of her full-length poetry debut, Phantompains (Book*hug Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Self-described as a collection that “fearlessly uncovers the trauma, grief, and rage inherent to the struggle to accept one’s own vulnerability and reach a place of love,” Jelly, Baby is very much an extension of that poetry debut, exploring ableism, vulnerability and both the limitations and the possibilities of her own body. “All I know is that I am too tender for my own good,” she writes, “and I hate myself for it.” There’s such a lovely pacing to her sentences, her paragraphs, obviously one fueled through an attention to rhythm, sound and the line, articulating and clarifying an array of powerful feeling into a kind of music. Further in the collection, offering: “How do I live in a body that can never be separated from grief? Grief as a predominant state of being.”

Much as her debut collection did, Jelly, Baby is composed in sections—six self-contained essays: “Inspiration Porn,” “Once,” “Exploring this Aswang Complex,” “Jelly, Baby,” “My Prosthetic Legs” and “Post-Mortem”—yet very much a singular, book-length exploration and articulation around her own engagement with the world, and having to navigate the expectations and demands, dismissals and hostilities, of others. “Once, at a literary event,” she writes, as part of “Once,” “a poet handed me a book they co-wrote with another poet. The book’s publisher marketed the book as a book about language, speech, translation, and connection. But the first three poems of the book explored the concept of prosthesis, artificial limbs, and prosthetic legs as metaphors for something I cannot really make sense of, something I cannot understand since my visceral experience of prosthesis isn’t art. Instead, it is a fusion of frustration and anger and melancholy and all the fucked-up experiences I have accumulated over the years as an amputee.” She writes “once,” but these are experiences at a breaking point, dealing with the ignorance of others far too many times to let it slip by unchecked and unremarked.

Smart and determined, Estacion works through vulnerability and rage, fear and intimate grief in a collection composed in portions, almost as accumulated prose thought-breaths, but less as self-contained essays than a sense of something larger, broader and ongoing. “Where are we now as a culture?” she asks, further in the same essay. “How long has it been since people like me were locked up, sedated, lobotomized, ushered secretly in the underground tunnels of Ivy League schools so they could be experimented on—and murdered—by people like her? When I and other people with disabilities go out, is there an inherited feeling that pulsates through the ether that says to non-disabled folks, Who let these freaks out? Where is their nurse? The nun? The psychiatrist? Where are their parents? The infantiliziation we encounter is inescapable.”

However structured as singular essays, or even essay-chapters, I would put this compelling and inventive self-contained, singular work in the same hybrid/memoir book-length category as recent titles including Ottawa poet Christine McNair’s Toxemia (Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my essay on such here] or Kingston poet Sadiqa de Meijer’s In the Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Allowing for humour and rage, her own limitations and fury at the ignorance of others, Estacion is a clear-headed and powerful writer, and this is a compelling collection of fragments purposefully cohered into a magnificent tapestry. “All the things that make us vulnerable,” she writes, near the end of the title essay, “and easy to obliterate.” One would be good to pay attention.