Jason Heroux, UNFINISHED WILDERNESS

SNOW

Some languages have fifty words for you. Others, none. This would is different from the cloud you left behind. Down here you’ll see pain, how easily we bruise and hurt, but not why. Very few things get along in our land. It takes years for a voice to be heard, centuries for a stone to feel at ease. Don’t worry if someone shovels you from here to there, or there to here, or not at all. You may end up packed in a ball, someone might taste you on their tongue or hold you for a moment in their hand. Don’t be surprised if you disappear. You may even grow to love your life before you go, or after you’re gone; you may even feel you belonged.

The sixth full-length poetry title from Kingston writer (and former Kingston poet laureate) Jason Heroux is UNFINISHED WILDERNESS (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2026), the most recent title in Stuart Ross’ surrealist poetry imprint, “A Feed Dog Book” [see my reviews of other recent titles in the same series here and here and here and here and here]. “We are both echo / and voice, wave / and shore,” Heroux writes as part of the poem “ONE ANOTHER,” “we are // one wandering lost / along another road, and another // welcoming one / inside our home.” Composed through a cadence of short poems assembled in four numbered section-clusters, Heroux’s poems each offer their own sequence of gentle turns and twists, narratives moving in and out of concrete focus. “Everything in this life struggles to struggle,” begins the short poem “HEAVEN,” “all ages of waves love to break against the shore. / The quietest note in a word fights to be heard.” A few lines further, as the short piece concludes: “Like a shadow warming under the sun, / I have no idea how happy I am.” With poems comparable to Kingston poet Michael e. Casteels [see my review of his latest here, also edited by Stuart Ross] for their quiet rebellion, Heroux’s poems present themselves as being more straightforward than they are, turning almost invisibly towards and into the unfamiliar. Listen, to the opening of the poem “SHOPPING CART,” a piece that suggests the inanimate object as an abandoned, grieving narrator: “I waited at the edge / of a vacant glistening / lot and wept. You // weren’t there. You / didn’t hear, but are you / nearby, listening, // now?”

It is interesting that Heroux works through such purposefully-slippery narratives ,given his own belief on poetry earlier this year as part of the Spotlight series, citing his own response to a 2014 interview question, in which he suggests that poetry is, in fact, a grounding response to our external barrage of advertising and corporate-speak: “Poetry is a way for the inner self to answer back, to have a voice in the world. The tradition and craft of poetry helps create a secure and enduring space for the hushed human spirit to shout out loud and clear.” And what, one might ask of any reader, do you hear through the work of Jason Heroux? Something surreal, certainly, but always and ever deeply human. Or the poem “NOVEMBER EMAIL,” dedicated “from and for Dag,” being his friend and occasional collaborator, Norwegian poet Dag T. Straumsvag. As the poem reads, in full:

The beautiful
naked trees,
all of a sudden
letting us see
deep into forests.
An autumn door
we didn’t know
was there, opening,
I think Tom once said.