Reading Black Poetry Across Canada: Part One
Reviewed by Samantha Jones
In a time when book sections continue to disappear from newspapers and magazines and journalism about literature can be difficult to find, I believe part of my role as a Canadian writer is to uplift CanLit through reviews and commentary. I spent this Black History Month/African Heritage Month reading and rereading poetry by Black authors and authors of African descent who live and write in the land currently called Canada. Although I have written this first instalment during BHM, I will add to this list at other times during the year. Part of my creative practice is to regularly engage with books by Black writers and folks from other underrepresented groups as often as I can to inspire my craft and to contribute to community building within the Canadian literary landscape. I hope you are intrigued by the highlighted books and encourage you to seek out Black poets all year round.
Come One Thing Another by Cory Lavender (Nova Scotia)
Gaspereau Press, 2024, https://gaspereaupress.com/books/come-one-thing-another/
Come One Thing Another is a rugged coastline of a book. Facets of identity and heritage are explored through characters and vignettes, some cozy or humorous and some wind-swept with grief and uncertainty. Exchanges between people and places are attuned to environmental changes and their effects across generations, recognizing the inseparable nature of community and the land.
As the “cobbled ode” (“Coming Home,” p. 11) is assembled, the nuance and complexity of what it means to be many things at once comes into view. And like the “sometimes-island” that appears disconnected from the shore at high tide in “Off and On at Bayers Island” (p. 73), this collection cultivates a patience that knows what is concealed will once again breach the surface.
Bottom Rail on Top by D.M. Bradford (Quebec)
Brick Books, 2023, https://www.brickbooks.ca/shop/bottom-rail-on-top-by-dm-bradford/
Part conversation and part perturbation, Bottom Rail on Top amplifies the historically discounted voice over the signposts that have morphed into something more subtle but still haunt the present (see “a loud noise in the heavens,” p. 65-73). The rhythmic “Not a poem” repeated throughout the book is a heartbeat that persistently nudges the archive into a remix that threatens the “cyclical impasse” (p. 104) and swells into a chorus of shared stories and relations.
This collection is hands, hiding places, souls, family, fields, fauna, journeys, music, and prayer. Its recombinations push through history’s manicured surface to unearth a reversal rooted in kinship from contemporary Canada to the Antebellum South. Bottom Rail on Top is an expertly researched engagement with the record and a stunning dialogue that reverberates with the timeless desire, “I can’t wait / to just dream” (p. 42).
Scientific Marvel by Chimwemwe Undi (Manitoba)
House of Anansi Press Inc., 2024, https://houseofanansi.com/products/scientific-marvel
Scientific Marvel is versatile and strategic in poetic form and style to reinforce and reveal both the uncomfortable and the comforting. Erasure is used to unmask, “who” it is that is “hurried toward / the bottom” (“Fact Pattern,” p. 68), and repetition prompts pattern recognition like the recurring variations of “Rename a place that was already named” (“Grunthal, Manitoba (2019),” p. 7). Verse nucleates on societal insincerities. The instructional “A passing or rote reference to Indigenous peoples, broadly (post ~2015, apologetic in tone)” in “Winnipeg Poem” (p. 2) an example of “First the sleight, then an unveiling” (“360 Portage,” p. 19) that becomes obvious as time passes and words are found hollow.
This collection asks what does it mean to write place and what stories are expected versus what needs to be said? Resisting the status quo also includes highlighting the body as a site of pleasure and joy. And as someone who also feels deeply, I too “tend to believe / very much, with my whole body” (“Epithalamium Ending in Death,” p. 44), which is perhaps why I delighted in allowing Scientific Marvel to fully wash over me.
About the Reviewer
Samantha Jones (she/her) is a poet, editor, and earth scientist based in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary, Alberta). She is Black Canadian and white settler, with roots in Nova Scotia, Québec, and Ontario. Her debut poetry collection, Attic Rain (NeWest Press, 2024), won the 2025 Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2025 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Sam is one of six Land and Labour Poetry Collective members who co-edited the anthology I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis, which was published by Roseway in 2025. Sam is currently a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Health Arts Research Centre, University of Northern British Columbia, researching poetic inquiry as a method to connect climate and weather to experiences of wellness.
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