Review: Wellwater

Wellwater

Author: Karen Solie

House of Anansi Press Inc, 2025

ISBN: 9781487013400 (paperback)
9781487013417 (EPUB)

$22.99 CAD (paperback)
$18.99 CAD (EPUB)

112 pages

Ages: Adult

Wellwater, Karen Solie’s sixth book, provides thoughtful, occasionally wordy poems that interrogate the housing, environmental, and economic crises of the present. In free-verse, the poems follow something of an emotional narrative, ruminating on malaise before transitioning to a fresher series on nature. Solie brings out lyricism from decay while still underlining its ache and undesirability. Recurring imagery of agricultural practices–economic exploitation of land, at times technical diction of herbicides, GMO seed patents, trademarked chemicals, and several mentions of glyphosate–gives some poems a deliberately analytical feeling. Landlords, rent, and other pains pervade the poems; in “Toronto the Good”, landlords are suddenly able to make apartments habitable only after “renevicting” their longtime tenants. Occasionally, some elements in the poems were left a little too unsaid; for example, “Basement Suite” is about an Airbnb, but the poem’s meaning is more obvious from the back cover than the poem itself. Wellwater would be a good addition to Canadian poetry collections in public libraries.