Fenn Stewart, women & roosters

 

the earth’s on fire so I go camping

woodsmoke & damp sea air

I know you hate camping, but it’s a thing I do

you’re gonna have to get used to it

The second full-length collection by Vancouver poet and editor Fenn Stewart, following a trio of chapbooks (including one with above/ground press) and a full-length debut, Better Nature (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017) [see my review of such here], is women & roosters (Book*hug Press, 2025), a book-length lyric suite that furthers her ongoing explorations and critiques of colonized space. “I want to put my foot but there’s nothing there to stand on like a two-by-four that rotted out of the deck my uncle’s fixing with leftover bits of cedar gone like a rotten tooth from a head that wants its tooth back gone like a man with a wife gone like the sleeping bag from the back of my dad’s car in high school” she writes, in an almost breathless rush, early on in the collection. After a space or two, returning: “I’m writing to stop myself from writing you [.]”

The prose lyric of women & roosters is composed as a single, extended, book-length assemblage of meditative, self-contained accumulations, set in prose with lyric, gestural flourish, writing an anxiety of and around loss, longing, heartbreak. She offers sketchnotes of a story, one step at a time. She writes an isolated, intertwined and interconnected lyric, conversational and even episodic, propelling a narrative as unruly and precise and as thoughtful as any ongoing conversation, with a variety of asides and returning subjects, reminders of what has already been said. “You write back saying it’s pretty funny how you answered me sending you that article by saying something about your grandmother.” she writes, responding to her own prompt: “I think about this for a while, and of course you’re right, and also of course I keep thinking about my grandmother nonetheless, and about how the woods her are so full of the things that my grandmothers and grandfathers brought with themselves from England: English ivy and English holly, the wrong kind of blackberries, those variegated creeping things with little yellow blobby flowers that are basically unkillable, and of course Scotch broom, which is the same.”

At times, the prose is subtle, quiet, beautifully straightforward; other times, propulsive, almost breathlessly so, rushing “I learned (from T’uy’tanat-Cease Wyss) that huckleberry bushes are much, much older than you think. It takes like a hundred years for them to get as tall as me, and I’m not tall. When we were kids, there was a family that wouldn’t let their kids eat huckleberries. Blueberries are blue, they said firmly to their children, so those aren’t huckleberries. You can’t eat them: they’re poisonous, because they’re red, and they’re not huckleberries. They are, though—I’ve been eating them all my life, and I’m still here.” women & roosters is composed in a structure akin to a journal, offering self-contained entries that build and meander, ebb and flow, offering certain echoes of titles such as George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970) to K.I. Press’ Pale Red Footprints (Pedlar Press, 2001), Lisa Robertson’s The Weather (New Star Books, 2001) to Kate Sutherland’s The Bones Are There (Book*hug, 2020) [see my review of such here], although Stewart’s title is composed as a journal, instead of from a journal or archive. Perhaps a more apt comparable would be Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley’s Vixen (Book*hug Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] (which is fitting, as Ridley was Stewart’s editor for this collection); although Ridley’s collection was composed via more overt lyric fragments over Stewart’s lyric prose, the overall structures both provide a flow between sections, moving across a slow and lengthy distance, and a horizon one can’t necessarily see until there.

About a month later (still a whole year before I got sick), I was running up this same exact hill—(I used to run up this hill all the time, but I can’t do it anymore), and I said to you, “Isn't there a risk, if we just carry on like this?” And you shrugged and said, “Probably, yeah. But it’s a risk worth taking,” and I was pleased all over like a happy dog, but I also knew that you had no idea what that meant, what it would mean. And you still don’t, really.