Questions of healing, chronic pain explored

In her latest book, Save Your Prayers — Send Money (Talonbooks, 107 pages, $20), Jónína Kirton writes a layered, lyric map of chronic illness, race and the pitfalls of New Age avenues to healing.

While these poems and prose pieces are rooted in Kirton’s own family and history, she draws on these experiences to express solidarity with others, namely with other people with chronic illness and their caregivers, as well as the Palestinian survivors of genocide in Gaza.

In the cost of living, Kirton enumerates the costs of chronic illness: “chronic pain = more pain,” she writes, “shall we begin at the bottom/ work our way up …// these feet weren’t made for walking/ fallen arches arthritis in big toes/ orthotics: $530 plus.”

Each of the listed costs, not covered by public health insurance, adds an increasing burden on those with chronic illnesses. Coupled with the attitude of, “If you can’t afford the treatments, there is disdain,” Kirton makes the argument that “we need practical support, not prayers or suggestions shouted from the safety of the shore.

“So many stories lost and so little sorrow shared,” she writes in the first section, where she posits: “I believe the beginning of my health issues can be found in the trauma the women in my family carried but never spoke about.”

The poems in this section trace the original wound from the displacement of the Métis through the specifics of her own family story and her place in it: “my body a place of convergence/ followed by rupture/ (…)/ it cannot/ contain both sides/ and yet it must.” This between-ness forms the basis of solidarity and the ground from which Kirton continually reassesses her own thinking and ethical commitments.

What emerges over the course of this collection, animated by the question of what healing might look like in relation to chronic conditions, is a web of ancestral and community belonging: “if only we could remember where we came from/ and the days we spent swaying together// moving as one.”

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“It is not the frequency of massacres in modern society/ that only troubles my mind (…)/ but also, the ease, so customary, so clinical, with which/ we seem to shrug and move on,” writes Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike to open We Survived Until We Could Live (University of Calgary Press, 136 pages, $25).

This opening suggests one of the reasons Umezurike is compelled to bear witness to the memories and the afterlife of the Biaffra-Nigeria War.

The speakers of these poems are composite personae of a father, son and mother, and Umezurike uses these to produce a faceted portrait of a way the violence of war lives on in the family.

Late in the collection, after multiple accounts of the father’s violence toward, primarily, the mother, Umezurike writes from the son’s perspective: “I’ve never seen my father cry until this evening.” Here, the father is mourning the death of a friend: “Hauled out like a piece of junk, my father said./ The war should have taken him instead.”

There’s a darker thread in this poem and in the collection than the father’s grief, though, and it centres on the son: “I think of the many times he made her cry,/ made me wish I lived with someone else.”

Umezurike handles this darkness with sensitivity and no small amount of tenderness. The sharp wedge of the son’s resentment builds tension through the subsequent lines until “My father reaches for the glass, but I let it drop.”

Here is the suggestion of how the war might persist through yet another generation, though the way Umezurike breaks off the collection, that persistence balances on a knife-edge, neither guaranteed nor averted: “I say nothing, and together,/ we watch, in my father’s absence,/ what the sky has for us.”

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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 the fall of 2026.