Collection contemplates the left in deft, urgent verse

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi’s latest collection, The Book of Interruptions (Wolsak and Wynn, 96 pages, $22), speaks to the present political and cultural moment on the left. These are, in part, documentary poetics for a dissociative, violent age, an accumulation of “horror’s lyricism/ such/ a theatrical end times.”

In the resonance of “an echo/ of a city/ that screams/ and screams/ and screams” Mohammadi uses a combination of dream- and delirium-inflected language amplified by and in tension with the material conditions of the speaker’s life: “in the city that screams/ my thoughts are taller than me/ I’m between two hemispheres/ tight-latched with worries of inflation.” The collection gathers momentum fragment on fragment, image upon image, motif on motif, to disorienting effect.

The final movement folds language and time on themselves and engages with a tradition of revolutionary messianism. Like the rest of the collection, this poem is at once disorienting, compelling, and urgent: “a foretold history where no future is an epoque (…) a word, then a word then anger. a word salad a word sandwich. a language crashing at the heat of the sun.”

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The poems in Margo LaPierre’s Ajar (Guernica, 100 pages, $23) encounter the difficult terrain of gendered violence, suicidality and psychosis with a deliberate softness and compassion. This stance is amplified by LaPierre’s movement between a spacious lyricism and stark directness throughout the collection.

The speaker’s account of her experiences, particularly that of the violence inflicted by the psychiatric system, are clear-eyed. In Harm Done, for example, LaPierre describes a nurse “with contempt/ in his veins” treating her after a suicide attempt. “He told me/ if I’d really wanted to kill myself,/ I would have used/ [redacted] instead.” The anecdote is all the more powerful for its refusal to either overexplain or soften the violence of that lack of care.

In addition to the speaker’s presentness in relation to her traumatic experiences, Ajar contains a distinct though related voice that is both looking backward and forward in time. “Causation travels backward sometimes./ Time is both ward and warden. We are Keys.”

In the last poem of the collection, Entity, the speaker returns to her parents’ basement, the site of one of her formative hauntings. “I realize I am here// behind the stove’s cast iron hulk. I am the haunting entity.// I am watching that teenage girl// tip her head to me, politely,// and say hi.”

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The latest collection from rob mclennan, The Book of Sentences (University of Calgary Press, 198 pages, $20), is rooted in his close attention both to the matter that makes quotidian life and to the semantic components of language. The COVID-19 pandemic, mclennan’s father’s death, the deaths of poets and friends and the emergence into a more fragile and fractured world are rendered in “The plain language of the earth. Our youngest monologues/ the long grass, anticipating mowers. In lockdown the world// is through this window.”

Among the things mclennan is both working out and honouring in the collection are the personal and intellectual losses and legacies. In Burning the dead grass, he uses the remembered “springtime ritual: layers of controlled burn” as an entry point to consider the settler relation to the land: “Monty Reid: No way to distinguish// what one has chosen to remember// from what one has chosen to forget. {…]/ {…] Lineages// the settler descendants do not reference.”

Overall, the book of sentences is a prolonged consideration of the intersection of writing, thinking and life. From the poems called Autobiography, one of which begins, “Neither a short walk nor a short talk. Once upon a time,” to Lecture, on craft, where “Not the first death./ The ways in which we/ swallow form. A crease// of each turned page,” mclennan brings together citation and observation with equal degrees of attentiveness.

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen’s first collection The Night, The Knife, The River will be published by At Bay Press in fall of 2026.