Acts of Dismantling

A speaker wonders, “Is this beauty, all this grass?” Looking out on the prairies, at “grass-covered hill after grass-covered hill,” they ask their listener to “be quiet for once. Less / than your own boot print.” In her sixth collection, Wellwater, Karen Solie narrows her focus, looking to the ground and the “belowground” for what we can learn from detritus, soil, tendrils, puddles, sidewalks, and shadows “lying on the snow.”

Solie has always dealt in compression — of language, sound, images. Here it extends to the atmosphere. The sky is claustrophobic, flat, and unknowable. It hangs like an “attic / above the low ceiling” and obscures any sense of perspective. “I’ve never understood what ‘starlit’ means,” one voice admits. “On a clear night in their millions / they cast no discernible light.” Throughout, Solie refuses to have her readers squint and make meaning out of something in the distance. Even in the exceptional “Orion,” the speaker simply wishes to...