When Whales Went Back to the Water

Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird's When Whales Went Back to the Water creates a reverent container for a broken world. These poems are hymns to living in wonder through loss, joy, motherhood's sleepless nights, domestic violence, and isolation. Offering a courageous account of queer intimate partner violence, including the impacts of femme erasure in queer communities, this book is also grounded in the tastes and textures of a new parent's everyday and is keenly interested in our capacities during personal and global catastrophe. Haunted by hawks, coyotes, frogs, and forests, the collection also speaks to the power of the beyond-human sphere in the translation and transformation of pain and sorrow. Reaching through stories of survivorship to touch on personal and collective pain with tension, nuance and care, Baird's poems remind us that grief is inextricably intertwined with love and joy. Baird's poems traverse through joy, loss, parenting, domestic violence, and isolation. Steely, tender, and sensual, this collection creates a reverent container for a broken world. Baird's poems traverse through joy, loss, parenting, domestic violence, and isolation. Steely, tender, and sensual, this collection creates a reverent container for a broken world.
"What gorgeous magic Baird excavates from human circumstance. Rich with celebration, grief, and a touch of science, When Whales Went Back to the Water navigates a labyrinth of survivals. 'You will / grow to be a wild thing,' Baird promises. And isn't that the gift we each most desire?" Jeanann Verlee, author of PREY and others
"When Whales Went Back to the Water sings and pushes language with its uncanny imagery, unexpected word choices and combinations, and play with spacing and breath. With its linguistic lifts, Baird's collection shows the power of free verse to convey lyric beauty." Jenna Butler, author of Revery: A Year of Bees
"When Whales Went Back to the Water deftly moves between microscopic, geological, and intimate perspectives to show how we are 'animal[s] made of other animals'-and the grief and belonging that entails. Amidst housefires, environmental decline, domestic abuse, the word 'trauma' graffitied on a garbage bin, Baird conjures hard-earned awe." -Adèle Barclay, author of Renaissance Normcore
"In When Whales Went Back to the Water, Lisa Baird asks us to see the sacred in each moment. Again and again, this book calls us to the present with a clear voice and a sharp eye. Personal loss and collective emergency meet poignant truths of the natural world. 'A relocated coyote will do whatever it takes to get back home,' Baird tells us. She bares her own path home to herself: past nettle patches and open fields, through echoing violence and recovery, to the messy kitchen floor of new parenthood. We are in this together, these poems remind us. Even solitude is a collective condition." Alessandra Naccarrato, author of Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene


I


• When Whales Went Back to the Water


• Poem That Wanted to Be an Apple


• It Is Relevant That I'm Ovulating


• Explanation


• The Biggest Disappointment of My 16th Year


• She Says, I don't think I'm going to fall for you


• An Alternate Universe in Which My Trauma Response Is Made of Birds


• Time Machine


• The Day Dad Starts Hitting My Younger Brother


• The First Time I Go Skinny-Dipping


• In Defence of Purple


• Poem That Wanted to Be an Icicle


• She Says It's Dangerous to Open Umbrellas Indoors


• Why I Thought Dating Women Would Be Safer


• On Seeing the Word Trauma Graffitied Onto a Garbage Bin


• The Mouth Is Your Hardest and Softest Place


• Blue Angel


• Ode to the Mississauga Women's Clinic


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• II


• All His Ex-Girlfriends Are Monstrous


• Affirming Femme


• You Don't Understand