• Winner of the 2020 Fred Kerner Book Award
• Longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence in Poetry

Out of dried tears and burnt matter comes fertile ground, new nourishment. A woman traveller walks up and down a mountain, back and forth through a quarter of Grenoble over the course of many months, experiencing anticipatory grief and later bereavement over the loss of a spouse. With little to anchor her, claim her, as she walks poems begin to seek her out. Poems of dislocation, cultural migration, rage, healing and transformation spring forth and set root – poems that transform the vocabulary of science, its language and concepts, into poems that encounter the natural world with an intensity and clarity that direct us to the core of our humanity and the tender parts of our being. These poems are crafted out of the language of dreams, mythologies, and inventions. Laced with subtle humour, irony and surprising turns, they return us to the place of origin seen anew. Like the egg and bitter herbs dipped in salt at the Seder Table, they remind us that beyond pain and grief, the only peace we have is the one we construct for ourselves.

Day in lab, night in the cemetery

for Meg Torwl

Bright bubbling cells
everyone hopes to kill

The poor products of the body
go crazy
anti-apoptosing
like the pure products of America
Dr. Williams knew

Chemotherapy
like hammering a nail
into a board
over and over

until it can go no further

Running rituximab
through a convulsing body
Anything ending in “ab”
will cost you much more
than you want to pay

There’s nothing more we can do now

I work in hell
the burning brightness of hell
the dark light of hell
where sequencing slides skim along
beneath the laser scan

Illumina named for
four bands of scintillating lights
pouring out in terabytes
from well upon well
no one gets to the bottom of them
no one is cured

Still searching
for the transcription factor grail
in the structure of the genome –

this four-colour map problem
not yet solved

The wild type
The unchanged one

The mutant
what survives

A change in order
and lung cancer thrives
My father turns to
ash in the ocean
born and dying in the serous sea
filmed with chlorinated effluents

For the longest time
my body would not create
not a baby
not a poem
And then it did
And now I wonder
what wild
unregulated creativity
will finally kill me

Legacy

A slide rule and a book
of mathematical tables.
The rule is made of bamboo,
flexible and smooth, it will not warp.

The inner plank and
glass lens slide easily
along self-lubricating grooves.
A case of cracked leather.

For 400 years mathematicians
and engineers used this device
based on the logarithms of John Napier,
known as Marvellous Merchiston.

Before I could read, I recited long
strings of Fibonacci numbers.
When I was eight, my father began
the lessons in set theory,

the critical distinction
between ‘or’ and ‘and,’
union and intersection,
the empty set.

A poet asked me if my father
took his work home with him.
I don’t think he knows many mathematicians.
Those who do understand

a mathematician is the work.
In this, like a poet.
The tables solve integrals
I no longer desire to.