I found myself awake at a ridiculous hour this morning and decided to get up instead of tossing and turning, to treat my insomnia as a gift rather than a curse and read something. But what to read? Zoe Dickinson’s chapbook, Intertidal: Poems From the Littoral Zone arrived yesterday. Why not that? I picked it up off the kitchen table, lay down on the living room sofa, and started to read.
I’m taking a creative-writing workshop for the next few weeks with Victoria poet Yvonne Blomer. Last week, at our first meeting, she shared one of Dickinson’s poems, “hope for the human race,” which amazed me. It imagines humans, not mosquitoes, as the true pests in the ecosystem, creatures that enable the pollination of orchids merely by accident. I had to know more. I contacted the publisher, who put me in touch with Dickinson, who sold me the very last copy of the chapbook. It made the journey from coastal B.C. to Regina in less than a week.
I suppose Intertidal is a chapbook because it’s short; it’s not one because of its production values. When I think of chapbooks, I think of something photocopied, stapled, very bare bones, like the ones I bought when I lived in Toronto 30 years ago, like the one I made out of my friend Peter Gould’s cartoons, which had a print run so small I didn’t even keep a copy. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that aesthetic, but Intertidal is something else: shiny paper, full colour illustrations, perfect bound–it’s a book, full stop, just a short one.
And it’s remarkable. In a foreword, Dickinson explains what a “littoral zone” is: a coastal ecosystem that “ranges from the high tide mark to the subtidal area,” defined by the ability of sunlight to reach the sediments below the ocean. In this city, about as far from an ocean as you can get, Dickinson is describing something wondrous, exotic, and the creatures these poems consider–sea urchins, which don’t die of old age; bryozoans; nudibranchs–are beings I’ve never thought about. Some of the birds I recognize: gulls, of course, which are everywhere, and barn swallows, which nest under the bridge on Broad Street in the summer. But those are just the topics. The language, the curious arcing thoughts, are amazing. The poem about nudibranchs, for instance, describes this sea slug, which has no shell and absorbs poisons from its prey as a way to defend itself, as a “dubious dorid / shag rug, / moss landing aeolid,” and implores it to “teach me to be soft / and inexorable.” To be soft and inexorable–what a lesson to learn.
I love this chapbook; I’m looking forward to the appearance of Dickinson’s first full-length collection, which is forthcoming from Guernica Editions next year.