Long Exposure by Stephanie Bolster (Palimpsest Press, 2025)

 Long poems are incredibly challenging to write. There is no doubting that. And especially when one is attempting to include a wide range of everything in the way of tragedy as Stephanie Bolster is in this fifth, and most ambitious collection, Long Exposure. Its composition initially spurred on by an absorption in Robert Polidori's photographs of a post-Katrina New Orleans, this fragmented narrative incorporates Chernobyl, the Japanese village of WW II exiles known as Tashme, the economic plunderings of Expo 86, the Tohoku tsunami, home with her young daughters in Pointe-Claire, QC and, writ in smaller font as awkwardly occasional sidebars, some of the confinements and transformations of the early Covid era: "How to tip when cash is untouchable?..."In the virus spring the leaves come slow." I was thinking about TS Eliot's "heap of broken images" in The Wasteland while I read this compelling but distanciating book, and also Dionne Brand's incredible long poem from 2006, Inventory, a text that too references Hurricane Katrina: "last night, late August,/Katrina's wet wing flapped, dishevelled/against the windows like great damp feathers, /she brushed the alleyways, the storm shutters,/ I felt the city she had carried away,/drowned and stranded New Orleans..." What makes long poems work when they must incorporate such an immensity of subject matter? How do they keep drawing the reader? Do we stay with Eliot in all his leaps or stray and why? 

Bolster's research has been extensive (16 years worth!) and when her ear activates the material beyond listings of facts or stats or data (though these inclusions offer both balance and context), the result is powerfully haunting as in this "o"-rich descriptor of a post-Katrina scene at the Camellia Grill: "He stayed for the song and the froth of the egg, for the oily spray,/the wash across the pan, how quick it was done and tossed/on a plate, oval and blue for a retro allure,/with slathered wet toast at the counter." Delectably painful. "It is not something that begins," Long Exposure starts and indeed, this is the heart of the challenge. Such a poem neither commences nor ends and yet the poet has to find an approach to shaping the melee, the gargantuan totality. As she says in another fragment, "the art of arrangement an eloquence." Yes but being eloquent about suffering is a problematized praxis, no? One feels that essential strain here, to make beautiful ("the dress/the centre of regret") and just to state plainly ("Internment camps   699/In detention, Vancouver   57/ Hastings Park, Hospital    105"), to include lists, numbers, Japanese phrases as if comprehensiveness were possible, and to detach into the ineffability of summarized knowing ("I might tell from the name/who lived here/but there are no names.") 

The reader cannot always situate themselves, though the segments on Katrina often being titled "Long Exposure" or the Chernobyl sections called "Shelter Object" assist. Of course, the point is that no matter how we structure such long poems, a singular placement is inconceivable. We will be spun by the waters of descriptive horror and land who knows where each time. Unlike in Brand's poem where the erratically-sized stanza predominates as anchor, Bolster's book zags rampantly between blocks of text, then far-flung bits, italics, enumerations, asterisk or lacuna separations and then, after all this necessarily discombobulating, vertiginous lunging, offers us a rainstorm at the close. This anaphoric downpour assembles all these sites: levee, reactor, named individuals, crops, policies, memory and beyond (dinosaurs, the house her father grew up in etc) and makes them one being in the world. All of it, all of us, subject to, affected by. O my I wish I could hear a chorus recite this book. That perhaps, in the human sounding, is where Long Exposure would ring out most wholly and stay, as it should, in the blood.