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Poems that look at our little world from space
In Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee positions these giant clouds of glowing space dust, often the "nursery" where new stars and planets are born, in an interconnected web of lyric form. As dazzling masses of matter and energy, fleeting, exploding and collapsing, creating connection across incomprehensible distances, these poems use constellations and light-years to reconfigure how art, mortality, loss, death, and afterlives are miraculous echoes and patterns in a gorgeous, chaotic universe.
Included in this dazzling collection are an extraterrestrial fox who works at a gas station, meditations about living across from a hospital during the Omicron surge, weathering climate disasters in North Vancouver, strange deep-sea ecosystems, conversations with a space-god who may be Walt Whitman, and multiple retellings of a Zen koan about tigers and strawberries. Here, respiration and repetition – literally, verse – acts as an outstanding formal feature, a way of creating connections and shared breath across spacetime.
"Nebulas inhabits with such erudite sensitivity the scalar and temporal perversities (or is it possibilities?) of pandemic still ongoing, never fully past. In this seemingly perpetual spacetime of risk and vulnerability, Kemp-Gee reminds us across the varied landscape of these formally restless poems the uneasy coexistence of human and non-human life, "collapsing homeward, deathward." I left these verses, which span "inverted echinoderm" to "asteroid," "feathers" to "cometary knots," mouth agape "to gasp and purr" with an awe about this world that can only be described as sublime." – Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of What's Left is Tender
"Throughout the centuries, poetry's sublime subject has been nature. But not like this! Meghan Kemp-Gee's third book, Nebulas, cements her unique position as a talented, original, multi-faceted mind using nature and science to understand human nature. It's dazzling. Every poem is unexpected. She's always burned with a biological curiosity; in Nebulas she adds an astonishingly wide astronomical lens, tied always to home. Tennyson predicted poets would one day 'walk hand in hand with the man of science': a century and a half later, Kemp-Gee pulls C.P. Snow's Two Cultures together into that rich and necessary whole. This poet gives us so much to think about, at a crucial time. We soar with her remarkable imagination. You won't get it, and then you will. Beautiful!" – Dr. Tara Cullis, President, The David Suzuki Foundation.
"Come follow Meghan Kemp-Gee on her kinetic tour from the forgotten edges of the universe into the soft heart of suburban Vancouver. Filled with startlingly vivid imagery, each poem is an electric meditation, whether pondering the Fishhead Nebula calling its Mom back, the gas station at the edge of town, Lions Gate Hospital across the street, or the sea creatures of Deep Cove. Starring an Atlantic giant pumpkin, constellations, strawberries, and Vancouver's SkyTrain and SeaBus, Nebulas is a study in how to whimsically render the ordinary. Populated with pipelines, climate change, ER wait times, long-haulers, and climbing gas prices, this haunting collection also grounds us in the new uncertainties of the 21 st century. For everyone who is "barely holding on," let Nebulas guide you, if you also "want to scream and scream." – Catherine Lewis, author of Zipless
"It is abundantly clear that Kemp-Gee, like the speaker of Walt Whitman's "When I heard the learn'd astronomer," has "look'd up in perfect silence at the stars." An impressively evocative collection of sparkling poems, interconnected by mythical and mundane motifs and catalogs of closely-examined minutiae, is the result." – Allison M. Johnson, editor of The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans
"In her latest book Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee has shaped gorgeous words for the many "not-n
In Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee positions these giant clouds of glowing space dust, often the "nursery" where new stars and planets are born, in an interconnected web of lyric form. As dazzling masses of matter and energy, fleeting, exploding and collapsing, creating connection across incomprehensible distances, these poems use constellations and light-years to reconfigure how art, mortality, loss, death, and afterlives are miraculous echoes and patterns in a gorgeous, chaotic universe.
Included in this dazzling collection are an extraterrestrial fox who works at a gas station, meditations about living across from a hospital during the Omicron surge, weathering climate disasters in North Vancouver, strange deep-sea ecosystems, conversations with a space-god who may be Walt Whitman, and multiple retellings of a Zen koan about tigers and strawberries. Here, respiration and repetition – literally, verse – acts as an outstanding formal feature, a way of creating connections and shared breath across spacetime.
"Nebulas inhabits with such erudite sensitivity the scalar and temporal perversities (or is it possibilities?) of pandemic still ongoing, never fully past. In this seemingly perpetual spacetime of risk and vulnerability, Kemp-Gee reminds us across the varied landscape of these formally restless poems the uneasy coexistence of human and non-human life, "collapsing homeward, deathward." I left these verses, which span "inverted echinoderm" to "asteroid," "feathers" to "cometary knots," mouth agape "to gasp and purr" with an awe about this world that can only be described as sublime." – Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of What's Left is Tender
"Throughout the centuries, poetry's sublime subject has been nature. But not like this! Meghan Kemp-Gee's third book, Nebulas, cements her unique position as a talented, original, multi-faceted mind using nature and science to understand human nature. It's dazzling. Every poem is unexpected. She's always burned with a biological curiosity; in Nebulas she adds an astonishingly wide astronomical lens, tied always to home. Tennyson predicted poets would one day 'walk hand in hand with the man of science': a century and a half later, Kemp-Gee pulls C.P. Snow's Two Cultures together into that rich and necessary whole. This poet gives us so much to think about, at a crucial time. We soar with her remarkable imagination. You won't get it, and then you will. Beautiful!" – Dr. Tara Cullis, President, The David Suzuki Foundation.
"Come follow Meghan Kemp-Gee on her kinetic tour from the forgotten edges of the universe into the soft heart of suburban Vancouver. Filled with startlingly vivid imagery, each poem is an electric meditation, whether pondering the Fishhead Nebula calling its Mom back, the gas station at the edge of town, Lions Gate Hospital across the street, or the sea creatures of Deep Cove. Starring an Atlantic giant pumpkin, constellations, strawberries, and Vancouver's SkyTrain and SeaBus, Nebulas is a study in how to whimsically render the ordinary. Populated with pipelines, climate change, ER wait times, long-haulers, and climbing gas prices, this haunting collection also grounds us in the new uncertainties of the 21 st century. For everyone who is "barely holding on," let Nebulas guide you, if you also "want to scream and scream." – Catherine Lewis, author of Zipless
"It is abundantly clear that Kemp-Gee, like the speaker of Walt Whitman's "When I heard the learn'd astronomer," has "look'd up in perfect silence at the stars." An impressively evocative collection of sparkling poems, interconnected by mythical and mundane motifs and catalogs of closely-examined minutiae, is the result." – Allison M. Johnson, editor of The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans
"In her latest book Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee has shaped gorgeous words for the many "not-n