Following her acclaimed 2020 collection, rushes from the river disappointment, UNMET continues to establish stephanie roberts as one of Montreal’s most exciting contemporary poets. By turns harrowing, defiant, tender, and humorous, this collection is unlike anything I have read before. Alchemizing a keen eye and restless mind, these are poems in which the speaker weeps “in the chamber of a blue whale’s heart;” where “t-shirts breathe like geese” and the Nova Scotia ocean “mak[es] butter / full of stars.” 

roberts’ linguistic boldness and exploration of the interplay between inner and outer landscapes will appeal to fans of Liz Howard and Dionne Brand, yet her voice is one of a kind. UNMET reads as thrillingly unconcerned with what poetry “should” be. Poems veer fearlessly across lyricism and experimentalism, pain and humor, vulnerability and standing one’s ground. Their contents range from a fantasy of making a man into soup, to a jazz-inspired love poem, to reckonings with domestic violence and police brutality, to a gentle ekphrasis of Vasily Kandinsky’s “Seven Circles.” 

Critical of how “[w]hite crimes of obedience click as silent syntax to / the flat and sharp sentences of death,” these poems reject the “overseer’s lexicon” to resist poetry as a space of exclusion. roberts defies respectability politics to depict a speaker “ris[ing] / to the wild of her life,” whether that be paying tribute to the victims of state violence or appreciating an “absolutely tremendous jar of garlic pickles.” She references Socrates with the same ease she does Marilyn Monroe, Star Trek, and Cardi B “levitating up a stripper pole / like a fuckin’ phoenix.” Rather than feeling scattered, these varied tones, themes, and dictions coalesce to suggest a larger whole: a record of living and thinking in the world. 

Revealing the artificiality of divisions between lyric, academic, eco-, confessional, and political poetics, this beautiful and unsettling collection is an accomplished work by a skillful poet of well-earned confidence. mRb