Anna Veprinska, Wound Archive

 

 

 

Last night your bones ached
next to mine:

 

 

 

 

 

so                                 this is love.

 

 

 

The second full-length poetry title by Calgary-based poet and academic Anna Veprinska, quick on the heels of her debut, Bonememory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], is Wound Archive (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2026), a book-length sequence of curved, carved minimalism across open space. “Emerging scarred,” she writes, early on in this unpaginated assemblage, six words filling the cracks of this particular printed page, “accountable, reach- /// ing //////////////// for god.” Whereas an archive suggests past tense, one might see the subject matter of Veprinka’s lyric are more ongoing, set across a temporal boundary in which her present perpetually remains, especially across the boundary of what the back cover describes: “[…] the wound left by the concurrent ending of a relationship and the beginning of a chronic invisible illness.” Comparable to the late Vancouver Island poet Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems (1965), as Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee suggests in his back cover blurb, for their shared use of allusion, brevity, spacing and emotional impact (both poems speaking to and around a relationship as well, although Webb’s piece set around the beginning, whereas this piece articulates the end), Veprinska’s lines are scalpeled, setting lines that slice as well as suggest, set purposefully on the stretch of the open page. “Heaving self //////////// congealed with prayer: //// touched, ////// edged.” Each word, carefully and delicately placed. Across her book-length poem, Veprinska writes a fragmented, careful archive, an exquisite extended lyric, around illness and recovery, wounds and the heart, and of being lost, and becoming found, again and again. This is a deeply satisfying and rich poem, and one to be approached and read with equal care.

 

Offered

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to the sterile, narrow known.