Poet's Corner: “half-blood” by Justene Dion-Glowa

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“half-blood” by Justene Dion-Glowa from The League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause, June 5th, 2024

A bison in a wheat field under a cloudy sky

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.

Justene Dion-Glowa is a queer Métis poet living in Secwepemcúl’ecw. An alum of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, they now work in the non-profit sector and recently released their first full-length poetry collection, Trailer Park Shakes, available now via Brick Books.

The brilliance of Justene Dion-Glowa’s poem shines through their use of white space on the page, which is one of my favourite craft tools in poetry. In “half-blood”, space—including caesuras, stanza breaks, line breaks, and indents, for example—works as hard as words, enacting the feeling of being ‘halved’ alongside a sort of sinister whiteness. But there is also space for thought, pause, breath, love, and reverence, for “the strength of our people / and Creator / reflecting in my eye shine”. The title of the poem, “half-blood”, isn’t extrapolated directly, but this is why it works so well: it layers the poem’s language. And although it likely speaks to Dion-Glowa’s Métis heritage, it also says: for so much to coexist is to be devastated—to be in a perpetual state of halving oneself and being halved by society. It’s both a brand of erasure and a necessary state of reflection.

Dion-Glowa, with tender care, also weaves in reflections on longing for the “sleek, hot, and slender-framed conventionally attractive”, “not made for a life of hardship”. A longing, now, to be halved. But I also think about the etymology of the word ‘hardship’, which conjures the rigidity of the British and French ships seemingly pouring into harbours, everything aboard inflicted like a trap. Dion-Glowa’s lines, here, gently shift blame and fault from them and their people. Followed by white space, I see these lines afloat, reclaiming the sea dominated by whiteness. 

There are also several short lines, intentionally placed to help us mirror feeling. For example, “spoons tapping along to the rhythm / I consider / how lucky I am / to have a weight I must carry physically” offers space to mirror how we consider gratitude, particularly with the inclusion of extra space beneath “how lucky I am”. Similarly, Dion-Glowa leaves extra space for generations to hurt—the past is not obsolete or ‘back in time’, it’s ongoing and always with us. The hurt didn’t happen behind us, it’s beneath our every step.

I’m also drawn to the musicality in “half-blood”, specifically in “girthy thighs”, “bison & bear”, and “food / fur / fibre / so / I starve no longer.” When rhyme and alliteration are used here, they ask us to chew. The language is delicious, so an excellent craft choice for the content of these lines (which become memorable for these reasons).

In the same vein as musicality, word choice profoundly shapes a poem. The word ‘meager’ stands out, starkly, because it’s the only word italicized. It also drives the last line, and is uncapitalized when we’d expect a capital ‘M’. We so often repeat “meager means” when we’re speaking about intentionally marginalized and “underprivileged” folks. By using lower case and italics, Dion-Glowa is tapping on the shoulder of the inflection—fear, discomfort, disgust—that’s used when we say ‘meager’, which our lexicon bolsters: “deficient in quantity, fullness, or extent; scanty, deficient in richness, fertility, or vigor; feeble, having little flesh; lean (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition).” Anti-fatness and ableism are apparent here without these exact words, reflective of the covert ways they outline our world. This is the power of poetry—‘meager’ is one word, and placed well, it does the work of evoking everything “half-blood” is alive on the page to say: in body, mind, spirit, and relationship, Dion-Glowa and their people are not, never have been, and never will be meager.

Poet's Corner: "The Albatross’s Sonnet to Western Civilization as the Madleen Sets Sail for Gaza" by Tishani Doshi

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

“The Albatross’s Sonnet to Western Civilization as the Madleen Sets Sail for Gaza” from Rattle’s Poets Respond June 17th, 2025. 

A bird’s-eye-view of a cargo boat

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it, alongside Tishani’s audio reading & notes about the poem. Further, here are helpful texts referenced in the poem: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834)” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and “Compare the courage of Greta Thunberg’s Gaza aid mission with the inaction and complicity of western governments” by Owen Jones for The Guardian. 

Tishani Doshi writes poetry, fiction, and essays that explore the meeting of the lyrical and political. The body recurs in her writing, stemming from fifteen years working as the lead dancer of the Chandralekha company in Madras, India. In her work, the body is “a vehicle to explore gender, violence, sexuality and power, but also as an agent of renewal and transformation.” Doshi’s writing has won and been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Forward Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Hindu Fiction Prize, Tata Fiction Award, and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She is an Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (paraphrased from her website).

Truthfully, the last time I read Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was in high school. Still a difficult read, enacting archaic English spelling, it’s fascinating to revisit now. You don’t need to have read it to experience Doshi’s poem, so in brief summary, it’s a long poem about the mental, spiritual, and physical consequences of violating nature (the mariner senselessly kills an albatross while he and his crew are at sea, and faces an onslaught of suffering). 

I was captivated by the question inherent in Doshi’s poem: if the albatross were to speak—in sonnet, one of the most well-used and unique of Western poetic forms, typically used in praise or love of a beloved—what might it say, now, flying above a humanitarian aid ship bound for Gaza, by which we mean and know: bound to not reach Gaza? For me, more haunting than the question was that I already knew its answer. I’d wager most of us do. And yet, “Remember, when all of this was going on, / there were some who were homesick for the world / and what it could have been, and others who were silent.”

Typically, a ‘traditional’ sonnet has fourteen lines, set in iambic pentameter, and utilizes a particular rhyme scheme: Petrarchan sonnets are ABBA ABBA CDECDE or ABBA ABBA CDCDCD, and Shakespearean sonnets are ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. In Petrarchan sonnets, there is one octave (eight-line stanza) followed by a sestet (six-line stanza). In a Shakespearean sonnet, there are three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a couplet (two-line stanza). There is always a volta before the final stanza—the poem’s transition or turning point. 

Right away, we notice that the poem bends many of these “rules”. It doesn’t follow traditional form, which to me indicates a need: to first understand/acknowledge a “rule” and then to break it. I wonder if this is why there are echoes of traditional form, particularly with rhyme in the middle of lines (end & friends, malfunctioning & unveiling, coat & told & globe, seen & besieged, and do & two, for example). Similarly, the volta appears with an em dash and a question: “what we’ve seen what we’ve seen what we’ve seen— / will you still ask, What can one boat do for the besieged?” It’s as if the albatross is saying, “I know your tools well, and I will try to use them to make you listen.” The rhyming words scattered throughout the poem amplify this, giving a sense of crumbling. The empire of Western civilization is falling apart and “coming to an end.”

Further, rhyme slants and tapers off as the poem moves. The last few lines don’t rhyme as much and feel matter-of-fact. But exceptionally poignant is the fact that the obvious rhyme with “been” in the very last line is “Madleen.” Instead, the final word is “silent.”

Stepping into imagery, we have the “friends” of Western civilization on a beach. I had to pause and think about who these friends might be, especially in conjunction with the “sheepskin coat.” All point to the uncompromising and unquestioning rule-following—“I only did what I was told”—bedrock among this family of civilizations, all of which followed one another, led like sheep, right off of a cliff. 

Last but certainly not least, the repetition Doshi uses with “what we’ve seen” three times alongside the preceding “when we’ve seen” leads into the volta. To me, this feels resonant of social media: we’re (necessarily) bearing witness to violence that so overwhelms our hearts we can’t describe it—all we can do is repeat, re-share, and repost phrases and clips. Interestingly, a version of this happens in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” After the mariner shoots the albatross down, the ship becomes trapped at sea, stuck without a breeze. The crew becomes so thirsty that they lose the ability to speak. This parallel is powerful, particularly after the Madleen was captured. Of everyone who wasn’t on board, who continued to speak when the Madleen’s passengers couldn’t? Poetry has an irreplaceable way of resourcing us with these types of questions and conversations. What a brilliant, needed poem. I hope we can all spend more time with it (and all of Tishani Doshi’s work).

Poet's Corner: "Meditations in an Emergency" by Cameron Awkward-Rich

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

“Meditations in an Emergency” from Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). 

At night, blue & red lights blurred by water

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it or consider purchasing or borrowing Cameron Awkward-Rich’s book. For an interesting juxtaposition, consider reading Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency” from 1954, which comes from his book of the same name.

Cameron Awkward-Rich is a poet, essayist, and professor who explores an “artists’ ability to reimagine the politics of social worlds.” Awkward-Rich’s two poetry collections include: Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). Cameron is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and writes critical/scholarly essays such as his book, The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022), which won the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in 2SLGBTQIA+ literature and cultural studies. Please read more about his life and work here!

I’ve long loved this poem, and couldn’t think of a better time to share it—or perhaps reshare it—with you. 

Let’s take a deeper look…

Firstly, the form is what we might call a prose poem—a block of text, which in this case, serves the content of the poem perfectly. It reads like a journal entry or a meditation that a reader can return to. One of my favourite craft choices in the poem is the juxtaposition of heartbreak with several things that, on the surface, might feel conflicting, such as waking and heartbreak or rain as thrilling and then heartbreaking. What a world we live in, where waking up in the morning breaks a heart. But there’s much more to heartbreak in “Meditations in an Emergency” than its ostensible meaning…

Gradually, what’s heartbreaking gathers like bunching cloth, growing more overwhelming. In suit, we’re asked to consider the necessity of heartbreak—to create cracks in space for all who break our hearts. The shift away from heartbreak’s frequent association with romantic relationships is powerful here. The people who break Awkward-Rich’s heart in the poem—and subsequently, ours—are not romantic partners. They’re people with whom we’re in a relationship in ways we don’t readily recognize, whether due to privilege, ignorance, or a blend of the two. And perhaps this is one role of the poet: to not only point out the emergencies people are experiencing, but bring forth the other, maybe more sinister emergency: that many don’t or choose not to witness their role in others’ emergencies.    

There are also striking images in the poem, such as “men in Monday suits” and running like fingers through the world’s hair. Hair, as an image, makes me think of care: detangling, combing, brushing, conditioning, tending, styling, braiding, tying up in elastics away from harm—all words applied to the unfolding of our lives. Hair is a beautiful metaphor for a world without borders, where wind blows it freely. In your world of hair—personally, communally, and globally—how do you care for it? How do you field both rage and softness?

“Children all of them” pauses me, every time: the vulnerability of being born is one we share, but it’s not one we all carry with us into adulthood. This is a breathtaking way of writing about the emergency of privilege and systemic violence. Again, rage and tenderness coexist. 

This poem also invokes curiosity about the word ‘dream’: the dream in which Cameron loves the world shares space with “the institution of dreaming.” How do these, together, help us see them as different? What is the institution of dreaming? What we dream about and hope to dream into being, I might argue, must be deinstitutionalized. Maybe the emergency is dreaming inside an institution where the manufactured dreams that come true maintain the status quo. 

Finally, the last two lines of  “Meditations in an Emergency” read something like, “I promise what I’m saying is true.” But what of the last line? Placing a hand on your heart to reassure yourself of its beating, perhaps to shield it, despite everything threatening to break it? Do we have heart attacks or is the heart attacked? How do we protect such a necessarily naive and resilient muscle, ungoverned by the thinking mind?