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Poets have always wrestled with the mutability of things (particularly or life and love) and with the problem of conveying the true shape of human emotion and experience through the often inadequate tool of language. The poems in Johanna Skibsrud’s new collection, I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being, employ the tentative and uncertain characteristics of language to their advantage, pulling the reader headlong into the fray as the poet endeavours to give shape to her experience.

“In many ways, I see the collection as one long love poem,” says Skibsrud, “The title poem was written very quickly, and with what, for me, was relative ease one morning last spring, and since then I have altered it very little–something that is also unusual for me. The poem is particularly important to my conception of the collection as a whole because of the way that it is able to speak, I think, from–and to–a space of desire inhabited, simultaneously, by conflicting and conflicted states of mind. It is, I think–despite, or rather because of its title–the most accurate and honestly-felt love poem that I have so far been able to write. Also, though, I think of the poem in reflexive terms: as in part about the act of writing, which is itself an act of desire and so, like all desire, bound always by the limits of its own terms. Just as the literal object of the poem is held in relief by the blank space of the page, however, so we are shaped, whether we choose to recognize it or not, by what is invisible to us–outside of what we assume to be the limit of ourselves and our world. Poetry allows us, importantly, I think, to push against that limit. It makes room for those paradoxes at the root of our experiences of language and selfhood–an acceptance and exploration of which is, I think, integral, to any genuine attempt at expression of being. It allows for transformations, for becomings: becoming a bear, for example, becoming a word. Love allows for this, too. In fact, I don’t really know where the space of one ends and the other begins.”

A sometimes satirical reflection on hope in a time of hopelessness, the poems in I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought use stubborn humour to grapple with the anxiety of moving forward during late capitalism. While many of the poems are set in Newfoundland, the book also echoes the universal experience of loss, leaving, returns, and never being able to return. The first section of the manuscript, titled “Some Disasters,” introduces real and imagined catastrophes. The St. Lawrence tidal wave, the history of resettlement, and the Muskrat Falls debacle stand next to poems that live in an imagined future where the capelin refuse to roll and snow refuses to fall. The second section is titled “I dreamed I was an afterthought.” Here, the eclectic poems turn to a more personal perspective of place, my struggles with mental illness, and a feminist exploration of familial relationships. In “Of No Returns,” movement through time and space is tinged with the same lurking fear of irreversibility, a fear which has been amplified during the pandemic. There is a yearning for the “before times,” a time which may or may not exist.