All of Us Hidden by Joanna Streetly (Caitlin Press 2025)

It might come as little surprise that I adore lyric poetry, real lyrics grounded in actual experience that produce their own wild and accurate sonorities. I can usually sense a faker, a Mary Oliver-type poem that strains within its own imagery, desperate to produce a responsive "ooooo ahhhhh" in the reader, rather than one that flows organically with a depth of awareness of line breaks and assonantal bridges and an emotion that emerges from its origins, not one generated superficially via the placement of "feeling words" on the page. 

All of Us Hidden is that kind of book, a deep winding through familial loss and environmental torment, indigenous awarenesses and parental yearnings. The poems surge in five parts, of which only the final one "Too Fast" felt like it could have been re-shaped and the remaining pieces inserted into the prior four sections. Streetly uses the simplest of diction (salmon, rock, spruce tree) but interweaves these pure signifiers with the raw realities of a sometimes "sudden fuck" and also, indigenous threads of words and ways of seeing grounded in her own lived connection to Tla-o-qui-aht land and her youthful bond with an indigenous man and his sons. The first segment, "Dear Island," is especially powerful for its recounting of this formative time in her life. Both innocent and implicated, she repeats, "I still don't know things" (First Supper) at the same time as being open to the "delicate atrocities" of this long ago way of being, one that still hasn't attained closure, due to the sons having drowned as adults six years ago, their bodies never found although the kelp beds keep, "Whole collections: white Styrofoam dots....bottles with blue labels and blue lids...half-shells of mussels" (Gyre).  In a poem like "Cave Songs," and in a host of others, Streetly's facility with the stanza and line break make what could have been banal observations sing with mysteries of the lyrical spirit: "Ahead, a great space of water/ripples with regret, the past/all its human failure, clouds cold/with the animate breath of the dead." Listen to the consonance, the extensions of vowels, the tangibility mixed with the philosophical.

 The nebulous intensities of being a woman enter the second segment, anxieties about being a "#metoo" whose acknowledgment is impeded by relatable "guiltshamefear" (m --) and the worries concerning the bared "breasts I fret about" when "swimming in my skin" and potentially being seen, a fear transformed in the next part, into her body becoming "fifty years of velvet/ripple & fold, wind & sun" (Undressed & also Naked), the collection's rampant ampersands connecting everything with their overt typography. This section also addresses the dead mother and becoming a mother, the most potent poem being "Living my Mother," its prose-coffined stanzas each beginning with the knife-jab line of "My mother is dead" and unfolding into what remains (a tree, letters, her voice). The fourth segment, "Rising Green," enters the environment she lives in and that is being stolen, the ancient forests eradicated, the poem in long-limbed parts called "Civil Disobedients" enabling the reader to see inside the complexities of a logging protest where Streetly and her teenaged daughter carry the contraband of "sunscreen, water...crow bars" into the camp and the "platoon of cops" attempt to arrest them, she vanishing for a matter of hours while her mother questions, "Is it enough that we all believe in trees?"

Although some pieces fall into the typical comparisons of trees to "arms" or introduce discombobulated Picasso-similes that take the reader out of the scene, the majority of All of Us Hidden is not only eminently readable but also an emotive excursion into ways of seeing and being that many of us might not otherwise be able to access and thus be stirred by. Streetly's exquisite rhythms are particularly rupturing and memorable. As one of the final poems states, "So heavy, a plane still flies."