sometimes, forest by Elee Kraljii Gardiner (Talonbooks, 2026)

My first reading of sometimes, forest by Vancouver poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner, established a primal, earthy layer composed of mulchy fragments, forgotten roots, mycorrhizal detritus within me. I read it partially outside in my prairie garden, one overlain by my coastal knowledge and thus intent on tree-ing all. These pieces, which feel like sketches of entrance that I almost wished were bereft of titles and either flowed in one long poem, indistinguishable, or featured dates or seasons flowing between them, scatter in the manner of pinecones or poplar seeds and the reader must enact their own forms of organic titration to comprehend equivalence points (or refuse this ache for interpretability). 

A preamble connects the shard-poems to pandemic fallout and the 2021 heat dome and relates how Gardiner walked through the woods almost every day, pondering "how trans-species and more-than-human networks relate." Given that there is an extensive (and imaginative and even funny) glossary at the back, I did wonder why these terms weren't included as they are indubitably fractious and multiplicitous and easily contested. The reader DOES know where Gardiner stands in relation to the word "darling," though not "secondary sex characteristics" (which has the humorous anti-definition "see none of your business.") There is a density here that is usefully and necessarily mysterious and a little bit of obfuscation that might have been drawn higher into the light too.

As with Steven Collis, Rita Wong, Daphne Marlatt and other Westcoast poets, Gardiner engages with the land as language, the lacunas, punctuation play, twists of diction, weavings in of prior and partial poetic lines as with ee cummings: ") not even the rain has such small hands (" all markers of the mode, variously elaborated. On my second reading, I had not only engaged with the glossary but also with an afterword on process called "boscage" (or "a growth of trees or thickets, see also verbose") in which Gardiner describes her creation of "hylofeminism" or the interconnectedness of wood with being a woman in the world, especially in relation to the slowly-eroding cycles of peri-menopause, and also her recursive praxis of leaving texts and materials to eventually become particles within the elements. 

I pondered what would happen if the glossary and process elaboration were set prior to the pieces. Too top-heavy with concept? Or illuminating in a way that the reader could walk this word-forest with greater sensitivity and comprehension. Both seem necessary to fold in the temporal palimpsest. sometimes, forest isn't a book that needs poems yanked out of it and paraded as examples of what works or what doesn't. Almost all lowercased and leaping fragments matter to the whole. Though these lines resonated movingly throughout both sets of ambulation: "what have you sacrificed for art?/whose beauty is apparent/and feeds through the daytime?"(owe) or "you island, you sandbar/you false creek/you piling, pier/swampland of eelgrass" (listen, estuary) or the breath-extension of "sink" with its singing of "the tide and the clock and the shadow under the dock/and the current and the haddock and the hammerhead/slide behind in lovely zoetrope" or the Louise Gluck resonance of "o late season pistillate/we are blending, darling/sharing a wild iris, aren't we" from "in hunt for the darling." 

sometimes, forest participates in the performative and theoretical conversation of creators like a rawlings in Iceland (also the text's editor) and Mike Schertzer, formerly of Vancouver who has long lived in Paris (and perhaps, Lisa Robertson echoes), where the poems on the page are a script for enaction, interpenetration at the core of what being fully alive, in response to, means. There is no end to such endeavours. They spin out into the ether and down into the loam, "ready to catch" as Gardiner says, "whatever I am."