Wellwater by Karen Solie

CBC

08-04-2025

The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solie's sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural, economic, and personal ideas of "value," addressing housing, economic and environmental crisis, and aging and its incumbent losses. In an era of accelerating inequality, places many of us thought of as home have become unaffordable. In "Basement Suite," the faux-utopian economy of Airbnb suggests people with property "share" it with us and, presumably, we should be grateful. In "Parables of the Rat" the speaker feels affinity with scavengers while also wanting the rats gone.
Having grown up in Saskatchewan on a small family farm, Solie sees the economic and environmental crises as inseparable. Climate change has made small farming increasingly untenable, allowing overbearing corporate control of food production. But hope, Solie argues, is as necessary to addressing the crises of our time as bearing witness, in poems that celebrate wonder and persistence in the non-human world. Tamarack forests in Newfoundland that grow inches over hundreds of years, the suddenly thriving pronghorn antelope, or a new, unidentified and ineradicable climbing vine, all hint at renewal, and a way to move forward. (From House of Anansi Press)
Wellwater is available in April 2025.
Karen Solie is the author of several poetry collections, including Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out and The Caiplie Caves. She has received many awards, such as the Trillium Poetry Prize and the Griffin Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. She teaches half-time in Scotland at the University of St. Andrews and spends the remainder of the year in Canada.