Anne F. Walker, Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length

 

Settling In

Unbelievably small roomette and a lounge car full of light. Full of people, fields, the bay the delta. Just stepping off and stepping in. I have crossed this country with my father, with my mother and sister. With my son and his father. Driven across with furniture as I migrated, first one way, then back. No Wi-Fi on this train. Lifting from Rosedale passing homes with green kidney shaped pools. Dry grassland. A smell of croissant moving through the cars before lunch. Voices waft in snippets, talk about a small round house, internet, taking the train, walking to a sale.

I’ve been aware of Anne F. Walker and her work for some time, aware that she was in Toronto during her early publishing career, having relocated to Berkeley, California for her doctoral work at UC Berkeley, and currently living and teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her latest collection is the prose poem suite Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length (Eyewear Publishing Ltd./The Black Spring Press Group, 2025), a collection that self-describes on the back cover thusly: “These 100-word prose poems are contained. They spread between sections. They break out into themselves. They repeat. They reflect on landscapes, bodies, travel, time, and rooted memories, concentrating on precision of image, narrative, and language.” Prior poetry titles by Walker, for those keeping track, include the full-length collections Six Months’ Rent (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1991), Pregnant Poems (Black Moss Press, 1994), Into the Peculiar Dark (Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1998) and The Exit Show (Kingsville ON: Palimpsest Press, 2003), as well as the chapbook when the light of any action ceases (Georgetown KY: Finishing Line Press, 2016).

The structure of a suite of “100-word prose poems” are an intriguing constraint, sixty-four poems grouped together into four sections: “The Train to Water,” “Hometown Return,” “Kaleidoscope Box,” and “Demeter’s Country.” Set as a loose travelogue through and between Toronto and San Francisco, the book exists geographically, even culturally, between these two distinct poles, set not as a linear straight line between the two, but almost offering the two locations where the author had lived to where she currently lived as a kind of counterpoint. “Knowing it has something to do with me,” she writes, to open the second of a run of nine self-contained poems, each titled “Good Use of Beautiful Light (on Clinton Street),” “locked in the narrative. When he turns to me a sun shines. Dusk falls when he turns away. I disappear into a Pavlovian dark: a mouth of childhood swallowing me whole.” This is a book of memory, perhaps, across a suite of prose poems, offering points along the grid of her life. She writes experiences within each period, each place, with sidebar considerations in a cluster of “@Fifteen” poems that write of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, or working as a hostess “at Smitty’s Pancake House in Banff,” for example. As that particular poem writes:

Just then leaving the hostess gig at Smitty’s Pancake House in Banff after I’d been fired. On those mountain roads, the clarity of sunlight and clear mountain air. That breath where I just felt somehow a fleetly neurtral truth that I was still a child, and that I should not be out on the highway. With my thumb stuck out. that all my bravado was false. There isn’t as much narrative to that memory. A moment like the morning light on a truck and the crisp shadow it casts. The moment moved by me, and I kept hurtling forward.

The poems sit curiously between a narrative of unseen beginnings and overt conclusion, writing stealth and wisdom across quiet narratives of movement. The narrative impulse is somewhere in the realm of Lydia Davis fictions or the prose poems of Russell Edson [see my review of his posthumous selected here], presenting a prose lyric rich in layerings and imagery, straightforward paths and hints of what may exist beyond the boundaries of each page. “An unease of ocean, large waves,” begins “Red Rock Beach,” “and of undertow pulling out to sea. Close to our towel the young slender couple dances half-dressed to invisible music. The wide ocean opens its wide mouth and waits.”