Sophie Anne Edwards, Conversations with the Kagawong River

 

OTTER TYPOGRAPHY

ngig, River otter

I enjoy following the otter runs all along the west side of the River, the quieter side, people-wise. I place small wooden letters at the entrance/exit of one of the burrow holes, and a piece of my hair as an introduction. I hope for some otter typography. I wonder, however, if this is a bit invasive? If the smell of my hands, my feet, my hair, and of course the letters will keep the otter away, away from this hole anyway.

I return the next day and surprise the otter coming up the bank. I return twice more. A couple of letters (N and V) have moved. This movement could have been the wind, not the otter, as there are almost no tracks. I decide to stay away for a few days to see if the otter will return to the whole. I return and replace the letters along the path after the recent snowfall.

The full-length debut by Manitoulin Island poet Sophie Anne Edwards is Conversations with the Kagawong River (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), a book-length study structured and presented through a blend of lyric, visual poems, photographs and archival material. Edwards offers, as Dr. Alan Ojiig Corbiere writes in his statement that opens the collection, “a creative and meaningful book” that “grapples with a decolonial approach to writing about, and with, place – a place significant to both the Anishinaabeg of Mnidoo Mnising and settlers.” Self-described as a “site-specific engagement with an ecosystem of Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island),” Conversations with the Kagawong River emerges from “several years [she spent] learning to listen to the Gaagigewang Ziibi (Kagawong River) and to follow the rhythms and patterns of its flora and fauna, the weather and the water. She invited the participation of various collaborators – woodpeckers, otters, currents, ice, grasses. The resulting poems, supported by local Edlers, language speakers, and historians, make visible the colonial, environmental, and social processes that construct an ecosystem and (settler) relationships to it.” As part of the poem, early on in the collection, “Conversations With My Toes Dipping into the Water at the / Bend Along the Lower River Where the Water Pools Before / Rushing Around the Bend and Over the Clay Deposits”:

To listen as a geographer and a writer is to understand the River as an animate, lively subject; is also to consider the marks, traces, patterns, calls, sounds, movements as texts in languages that I don’t speak, but might hear, feel, see. A site or a subject with a history, a story.

I want to hear the River, expand the definitions of subject, text, author, and listener. To attempt to listen on the River’s terms.

There’s an expansiveness to this collection, one that brings in an array of research and conversation and collaborate to form Edwards’ study of the river and its inhabitants, environment, ecologies and colonial interferences, comparable to how Fred Wah and Rita Wong’s collaborative art-text, beholden: a poem as long as the river (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018) [see my review of such here], to Lorine Niedecker’s 1966 poem “Lake Superior” (produced in a critical edition a decade back, which I reviewed here), or even the late London, Ontario artist Greg Curnoe’s historical excavation of his London lot, Deeds/Abstracts (London ON: Brick Books, 1995). One could also cite further recent comparables such as Jennifer Spector’s Hithe (Connemara, Ireland: Xylem Books, 2021) [see my review of such here] or Chris Turnbull’s Cipher (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] for an attention to minute, ecological detail across a constellation of lyric and visual expansiveness. Edwards attends to a listening, a conversation, one that includes the sound of the water, petitions to Colonial governments and traditional space, and the blend of visual forms, lyric and photographic montage is fascinating, opening up a layering of what might be possible through and across a poetry collection, structured akin to a gallery exhibition of more than two hundred rooms, two hundred pages. As the short lyric “August 15” writes:

She resides in herself.

 

To read a River            read the banks
            sounds                         sprayed into the air
  what she moves           over

 pen her words as      fluid
blood                              recirculating
            through the earth