Elee Kraljii Gardiner, sometimes, forest

 

sick and witching

like a day that begins darkly and rises into pattern
so my scape is written
in small solidarity with the diseased elm
buried and bulbous –
            saying not years but this           just this now       ,

                        , this twenty-four      ,       ,       ,

The latest from Vancouver poet and editor (and current 7^th Poet Laureate of Vancouver) Elee Kraljii Gardiner [see her 2016 ’12 or 20 questions’ here] is sometimes, forest (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026), following on the heels of her Trauma Head (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] and serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016). This new collection is self-described, in part, thusly: “sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker years for in herself. But the coastal temperature rainforest continues foresting, existing independently of the speaker’s wants or needs, a place of both refuge and harm. returning daily to the same woods, the speaker notices minute seasonal changes and considers her own internal changes too.” The changes articulate, and her short lyric bursts sit as a kind of constellation around the central core of her subject, or subjects: writing skant, slant, evasive and specifically on and around desire, time, a wealth of trees and the rich life of the forest floor. There is something intriguing about how Gardiner, to date, has composed book-length works, each of which have been shaped around particular subjects; each collection an approach and a response to perception, from the subject of figure skating, writing memories relating directly to her childhood and her mother in her full-length debut to the concussion and recovery poems of her follow-up, and now this ecopoetic around networks, moments, duration and landscape. “try to city / but go boreal,” the poem “cultivated” reads, “at the fence      drip /       rub the pheromone deep / squat and pulse      splatter [.]” Composed during and across the Covid-era, Gardiner’s sketch-poems mark moments across wide distances, offering clusters of lyric that pool and eddy, sit for a bit, and breathe. “come morning,” she writes, to close the poem “in midnight,” “an amnesia step // over strings of viscera // asking guiltlessly, raccoon or coyote?”

Set within a pandemic-era stretch of Vancouver’s coastal temperate rainforest, Gardiner’s ecopoetic responds to more than just the environment, but what the space provides. “sometimes,” she writes, as part of “eluvial,” “forest / I must trust you / more than water / to solve for balance [.]” To open the collection, Gardiner offers this, as her “preamble”:

sometimes, forest was written as an in-situ response to the pandemic and the deadliest weather event recorded in Canada. In June 2021, 619 people died in British Columbia from a week of heat so severe that birds dropped out of the sky mid-flight. In that week of the heat dome, intertidal zones of the Salish Sea reached an excess of 50°C, triggering massive die-offs across species; 70 percent of the populations of bay mussel (Mytilus trossulus) and barnacle (Balanus glandula) perished. Though the head broke, the resultant wildfires, glacial melt, river flooding, landslides, and reduced crop yields have had long-term impacts. As with the pandemic, the toll is complicated and more diffuse than raw data suggests: in Canada, 3.5 million people are living with long COVID, a consequence we are only beginning to recognize. As I witnessed these emergencies, I walked almost every day through the forest thinking about how trans-species and more-than-human networks relate, how they react to crisis, and how they exhibit interdependency and care.

It is interesting, also, how this collection connects to recent work by other British Columbia poets, responding with their own pandemic-era book-length ecopoetic titles around climate, crisis and British Columbia forests, including Kelowna, British Columbia poet Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Delta, British Columbia poet Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Gardiner, in comparison, ramps up an approach to language in its pure form, and the poems of sometimes, forest have such a wonderful thick and rich quality, a mélange of sound and bounce and visual play, offering a layered density of language as thick and teeming with life as any forest floor. “comforted to think you register my footfall in your soil / my weight’s dim thrum-thrum // within soft cacophonies,” she writes, as part of “spit sways,” “piled / in repetition across millennia / four footed, two footed, no footed // in a forest of slither / everything is a desire path [.]” Or, as the poem ends:

how your conifer’s crown feels eternal
            , even if falling      ‘
                        when you sap a pushing emotion inside me

Amanda Earl, Beast Body Epic

 

Feathermarked along or frost-etched
deep into and below. Stalactites
suspended into the dark and my body.
Am I destroyed or am I armoured?
Was I tough? Did I hang on against
all pronouncements?

One of the frustrations of no longer running a trade literary press is that we would have easily produced one or two further titles by Ottawa poet Amanda Earl beyond her full-length debut, Kiki (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2014), so it was a delight to see her self-produce her latest, the book-length Beast Body Epic (Ottawa ON: AngelHousePress, 2023) [launching online on November 12]. Beast Body Epic directly responds to the author’s health crisis from a few years back, and the ongoingness of Earl’s expansive lyric and visual structure echoes, slightly, of how Dennis Cooley responded to a burst appendix, through his departures (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2016) [see my review of such here]. As Vancouver poet and editor Elee Kraljii Gardiner writes as part of her introduction to Beast Body Epic: “She leans into visual poetry, the epic, allusion, disassociation, memoir, verse, prose, fable, allegory, and other modes in order to tell a complex story in a surprisingly succinct work. The variation is not only necessary, it’s seamless, and Amanda’s text flows with the protagonist through crisis into stasis and onward.” Gardiner is an interesting choice to write an introduction, as she knows full well about experiencing a medical crisis and exploring the same through lyric: her collection Trauma Head (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is “a book of poetry about [her experience with and after] an arterial dissection and stroke [.]”

Throughout her book-length epic, Earl offers a dense language of sound and play, traversing visual, prose, lyric experimentation and flourish, occasionally sketching a kind of narrative point-form. “Death spent years as the taker.” she writes, early on in the collection, “Loaded art into their conversation. / The Rot was too drunk and needy, couldn’t breathe. / She nightmare herself to sleep. / The sun ceased. // The fluttering started and didn’t stop. / First the pigeons, then the crows. / Black wing over black wing. / There’s a wolf in the labyrinth, / the Rot’s husband told her.” Earl’s lyrics and visuals are wildly performative, capable of incredible grace, flourish, anguish and precision, as required. “A nurse gives me Tylenol 3,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “a gown / and long white compression socks. / I feel like Anne of Green Gables or / maybe Raggedy Anne, my body / stuffed full of rags, my clothes too / big for me, a little orphan girl without / parents or anyone to save her.” This is a collection that somehow manages to fly in multiple, even contradictory structural directions simultaneously, while holding together as a clear book-length work with a narrative through-line. If you haven’t been paying attention to the ongoing work of Amanda Earl [see my review of her stunning Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry anthology here], you clearly need to begin.

 

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Caples, Coultas, Murphy, Turnbull/Gardiner + Ross,

Anticipating the release next week of the thirty-sixth of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the thirty-fifth issue: Garrett Caples, Brenda Coultas, Sheila Murphy, Chris Turnbull and Elee Kraljii Gardiner, and Stuart Ross.

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-four issues (more than two hundred and thirty interviews to date) remain online, including: Leah Sandals, Tamara Best, Nathan Austin, Jade Wallace, Monica Mody, Barry McKinnon, Katie Naughton, Cecilia Stuart, Benjamin Niespodziany, Jérôme Melançon, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder, Genevieve Kaplan, Maw Shein Win, Carrie Hunter, Lillian Nećakov, Nate Logan, Hugh Thomas, Emily Brandt, David Buuck, Jessi MacEachern, Sue Bracken, Melissa Eleftherion, Valerie Witte, Brandon Brown, Yoyo Comay, Stephen Brockwell, Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax, Cat Tyc, Michael Turner, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Tom Prime, Bill Carty, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Robert Hogg, Simina Banu, MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty, Lisa Fishman, Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey, Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming thirty-sixth issue features new writing by: Pam Brown, Kathy Lou Schultz, Shane Kowalski, Hilary Clark and Ted Byrne.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-four issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press annual subscription! (did you know that above/ground press turns thirty years old this year?) We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

SOME : fifth issue,

 

place can over there  and I’ll drop the tree upon it
while over there fetch bbq sauce packets in glovebox

offset on white crescent of bucket’s innard part
between plastic lip and hump of mushroom silhouetted
to take spinning half cut up hwy to sell the PG
creep who refused to leave the mountain who after
an agreement in good faith reneged hence
the loaner red semi driven w scant warning
over his tents, baskets, dog, kitchen things,
against bucket innard eyelid shape
extends flickering shadow of a ribbon of piss (Hamish Ballantyne, “from Hansom”)

I like what Vancouver poet Rob Manery has been doing with his print journal SOME [see my review of the second issue here] and the fifth issue, dated Summer 2022, recently landed on my doorstep, featuring work by Hamish Ballantyne, Clint Burnham, Jeff Derksen, Lary Timewell and an excerpt of a collaborative work-in-progress between Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Chris Turnbull. There is something really valuable about any journal or publisher able to publish work by writers who don’t seem to publish that often in journals, if at all (Lary Timewell, for example), as well as being open to work that might be seen as too long or too experimental for even journals interested in that kind of work. Hamish Ballantyne [see my review of his latest here] is working a larger project through a sequence of fragments, each small section simultaneously offering another and a further perspective. “practice breeds a / constellation of attendant / practices each indivisible / from the instants of their expression,” he writes, further in the excerpt included here, “Later we / if we can find each other in town / decide what they all meant […].”

The intricate and precise layering of Gardiner and Turnbull’s collaborative “MESH” is stunning, offering folds of text wrapped across each other. They’ve a further collaboration in the October issue of Touch the Donkey I look forward to exploring as part of our interview. And as far as Timewell is concerned, it is well beyond the time when someone should be publishing a book by this poet; I know there’s an enormous amount of uncollected work he’s been sitting on, and he certainly deserves far better attention than he’s seen so far. His “Eight Poems” in this issue offer echoes and roots of his 1970s and 80s Vancouver KSW language-origins, but with an engagement in the interpersonal that runs across the foundation of his entire work.

reminiscent of natural animal pleasures

it’s not escapades in cascades
it’s not business as usual
it’s not an unlivable wager
it’s not captivated or decorated
it’s not spurts of pleasant to recall
it’s not learning to be a good loser
it’s not you never loved anyone but yourself
it’s neither happiness not lacking in happiness
it’s not at hand it’s not out of reach
it’s not the blue funk of a sports slump
it’s not favour me won’t you with just one more smile
it’s not picking the lock in your daydreams
it’s more like thinking sweet things of others even as you slowly die
it’s more like it’s nothing like that at all
it’s more like as probably many of you will already know
it’s more like i suppose you have all heard the incriminating rumours of
it’s more (isn’t it?) like your so-called life

There is an approach to accumulated language and political writing that both Burnham and Derksen engage with that sits in a similar realm to other current and former Kootenay School of Writing practitioners; their work reminds of a similar flavour to that of Winnipeg-based poet Colin Smith, for example [see my review of his latest here]. For those aware of any of his numerous collections, Derksen’s four poems here offer elements of both the familiar and the unfamiliar, including a prose piece, “On a Generation that Squandered its Future” (I can’t remember the last time I saw a Jeff Derksen poem set in prose” that begins: “I was working in a gas station, a greenhouse, in delivery, in gardening, / in editing, in teaching, in administration. The weather has a new name and it / is no longer Elizabeth.” The shift in patter, patterns, is curious, while still retaining the accumulative effect of the long thread, writing language across issues of labour and capitalism. Burnham’s piece is an extended poem with a curious title, “letter from Mount Pleasant to Manhattan (on Kevin Davies’s The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Edge Books, 2008),” suggesting an enormous amount going on through this particular poem, accumulating some fifty to sixty stanzas of piled phrases collaged together to form something far larger, and far more complex. “before her if I have to spell,” he writes, early on in the poem, “it out for you thereby taking // the pamphlet from the / Western Front listing two / dozen Chinese restaurants / nearby now, twenty-odd / years later, I wonder / what the German / sisters are doing now are / they still perpetual / students or did they finish // their degrees and training, / work for a while in the Harz / mountain village their / family originated from […].” There are a lot of directions to grasp this poem, less threads than individual points, and it makes me curious to see this particular Kevin Davies title to get a better sense of how Derksen might be responding to that particular work. Further on, writing: “[…] who // remembers Lorem ipsum, / clip art, clip joints, I’ll / give you a clip on / the ear the / sound of small bits of / gravel and grit under / tires turning (but not rolling, if / you catch my drift) […].” Alternately, the first section of Derksen’s “Anonymous Fanon Poems,” reads:

That which is choking
you is also choking me

but its tight mesh
the police
the army
the state

is not from you

nor others
under a blight

and I will lose it last
following first after

you lose it

I don’t know who carries copies (ie: stores, etcetera), but the colophon writes that correspondence can be direct to: somepoetrymagazine@gmail.com and that “Subscriptions are $24 for two issues. Single issues are $12. E-transfers are welcome.” Also: note that the reading/launch listed here is in Vancouver, British Columbia.