Magnetic Equator, Kellough, Kaie

The poems in Kaie Kelloughs third collection are inhabited by migration and distance. They are ghosts that issue from suburban oblivion. They are released from their non-existence by suicides in the back seats of sedans. They wander, and seek a language for their wandering. The words they find are often made of smoke. They drift between North and South America looking for their ancestry in the Amazon Rainforest, the Atlantic Ocean, and the prairies, foothills, and badlands of Western Canada. They haunt the hostile suburbs of Calgary and they finally come to rest in the snowed-in, bricked-in boroughs of Montreal. They find their voice in the natural world and in the works of Caribbean and Canadian novelists and poets. They reassemble passages about migration, about seed catalogues, about origins, about finding a way in the world, about black ships sailing across to land, and this act of appropriation is evidence of two things: a struggle to explain a state of being hemisphered, of being present here while carrying a heartbeat from elsewhere, and a mapping of the distances travelled.