Meredith Stricker, SENTIENCE

 

Sometimes a soul does not know it is a book when living
whose pages can never be completed in a final, perfect, finished sense
but are continually translating themselves just as leaves fall and translate
the forest, chaparral, grassland in succession and no street adheres
to its past self, just as leaves fall and leaves love us and traffic is humanity
surging out of the boundaries of its skin (“I DREAMED I WAS A BOOK”)

The latest from California poet Meredith Stricker is SENTIENCE (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2026), a title that follows Alphabet Theater (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), Tenderness Shore (LSU Press, 2003), mistake (Caketrain Press, 2012), Our Animal (Omnidawn, 2017), Anemochore (Newfound Press, 2018) and REWILD (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The pieces in SENTIENCE explore narrative structure and collage, offering echoes of the cut-ups of American poet Susan Howe, as she articulates ecological concerns through elements of both the written and the unwritten, almost outlining an absence as a firm shape. “we are the secret / pinned to a vortex,” writes “ALEPH, BETA,” “raptured     with torn scientia / our little hands / the aleph, the beta / hungtight,   ringing / gone  o o o o [.]” What isn’t overtly there in her texts are outlined and physical, as Stricker layers direct statements and phrases that accumulate into something that leans into a kind of abstract, offering a sly ecopoetic sketchbook of field notes. “language is an animal it howls flees hides and waits watches us to see,” she writes, as part of the sequence “anemochore,” “if we’ll come to our senses in red algae bloom fluorescence or flake flake / flake of plucked pelagic pleading calm then kneeling [.]” She writes of lakes, language and bees across a complex sequence of texts, layering elements of the book across an ecological landscape, citing sentience and climate, whether trees are awake or asleep, whether animals can dream, and a landscape of the book itself.

I’m fascinated by how deliberate Stricker structures her texts, on the surface a kind of sketchbook through fragments, drawings of swirls and hand-drawn scribbles into a complex book-length conversation around our relationship to and inherent responsibilities to the natural environment. As the press release offers: “Looking beyond humans alone, she considers whether animals dream, who our relations are, what interior lives are held within words, and whether the world is truly alive to us today or if it is simply something we experience through screens.” There are elements comparable here to poet, editor and current Vancouver poet laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s sometimes, forest (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026) [see my review of such here], exploring not only ecological relationships but actual agency. Or, as the poem “WHEN RIVERS ARE GRANTED PERSONHOOD” includes:

when rivers are granted personhood
are you more or less sentient than whales 

do you hear them laid out and skinned
against the how of oblivion 

hunted and plundered then rendered
yet still curious about us 

___

 

when rivers are granted personhood
we are mortal like glaciers 

 

 

and if trees

 

have no soul

 

then neither
do we