CHAPBOOK LOVE LETTER CLUB

From Rob Madden to Un/Becoming by Dagne Forrest

In life, there is so much possibility and fluidity in being indefinable–unfinished, unwilling, and untethered from all the roles and stories  we, or others, demand. Yet our world seems to require certain definitions, specific identities and the labour that goes along with them: dishes demand cleaning, bills demand payment, texts and calls demand answers.

Dagne Forrest’s chapbook Un/Becoming, published in April of 2025 by Baseline Press, capably twists that tension between expectation and the ongoing process of being and becoming into something full of hope. It lets “unanswered texts and calls/ become the discordant music of/ a fast retreating universe, the/ constant accretion of trivial/ tasks the snowy static on the dial.”

Playfully using the prefix “un” in all of the titles, Forrest intricately threads 12 poems together that explore a creative life under siege. Physical limitation, familial obligations, mortality and memory all play a role in the speaker’s attention to each challenging moment. These poems reflect, refract, and echo through a generous landscape that references the rich history of poetic forms such as the cento, tritina, aubade and others. Family members, mathematicians, and other writers’ voices weave through these forms, connections flow from the singular perspective of the speaker in a way that feels redemptive and expansive.

In the poem Uncertain, the speaker describes a dream by beginning from a line from Sylvia Plath, “The night is only a sort of carbon paper,” and as Forrest’s speaker continues, “shouldered like the dark mantle of water/ from a recent dream” the reader also experiences “the best part of the day, the low light, the lingering warmth, the chance to step out of time together.” As in so many of the pieces in Un/Becoming, Forrest blends reader and writer, dreamer and interpreter, and the speaker finds herself in both past and present as moments unspool. Having crossed this surreal body of water and with it an entire life, she remarks: “No destination/ known, yet feeling both nowhere near/ and nearly there, the dark surface glinting/ with reminders – this has all been done before.” A door opens on the hinge of this: private worlds connected, the universe within us all, old orbits suddenly swung through the outer reaches of some new galaxy “embroidered with a net of stars.” 

The book itself has been artfully put together by Karen Schindler at Baseline Press, and along with the high-quality design, printing, and pages, includes a gorgeous original cover design by Auni Milne. A fitting vehicle for Dagne Forrest’s poems of resilience and transformation as they shake and loosen the lines drawn by the tensions our lives accumulate.

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From Kim Fahner to Ancestral-Wing by Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Ancestral-Wing demands that its readers not read in a linear way as it’s physically fashioned to have the reader turn the chapbook sideways. Right away, in her dedication, Sneha Subramanian Kanta thanks her parents “for the gift of a non-linear family history across mountains,” noting that “what tethers also flows” so that people “draw maps like veins” and consider “the litany of memory” in how they honour the “ancestors who bless and bond every day.” Before the chapbook poems begin in earnest, there is poetry here at the very start. 

Kanta begins with “ghost-lineage with earthen pitcher,” a piece that experiments with words and spaces on the page, while referencing her homeland, with images of “war-remnants buried in sediments of soil,” and a “blur of rain-soaked trees, fistfuls of rice emptied into copper-bronze/ vessels.” In the place she writes about, there are “ghost meadow reflections/ heft-rims of warm surfaces” and “oncoming monsoon-burst…worked into smooth of rain.” There is an ancestor who “passes/ courtyard with sounds of bangles,” so that the past weaves itself—alive and sensual—into the present. 

In “Losses,” the poet writes of a year when “god brought me a gift/ of corpse after corpse// & my tongue tasted like ash/ residues from the bodies// of the ones I love.” After those deaths, there is no way to romanticize loss, and she pays “homage to/ the labor of empty porches.” Kanta writes elegies, yes, but also conjures images of hope in other poems with lines like “My grandfather believed in lighting// lamps that glittered over the surface of the balcony./ I invoke light in an inverted inheritance” and “Sepia stars beckon arrival/ for something larger than the sky.” The poet draws on the symbolism of light—in moon, stars, sun, and the way in which daylight is “scattering over a row of pine trees.” Shadow and light go together throughout the poems in this chapbook, so that the reader is left thinking about ebbs and flows, those living waves of love and loss. One—the poet seems to say—does not occur without the other, so it’s best to notice and honour both. 

What’s most noticeable about the style of Kanta’s poems is the wealth of carefully chosen and crafted images that run through Ancestral-Wing. They lift the poems up as a bird might, but offer an anchor as an ancestral tree might, too. In “Because the Night Will Go On, You Say,” the poet considers how “petrichor lingers// among the coconut trees,” and asks “What ceaseless reflection is this? Lilac, orchard, and tinsel remnants./ The soft orbit of vertigo.” In “[Hindi],” the poem begins: “after thistle, summer/ fuschia sky waddling// into dusk like prayer,/ murmurations release// someone has packed fallen roses/ amid bilirubin shoots.” The image of that sky waddling into the evening like a hopeful prayer is beautiful. The rest of her poems are like this, as well: brightly sculpted lines and thoughtful reflections on what home is, how family (here and gone on) connects us to that place, and how a person finds identity in their movements away from that first place. Published by Porkbelly Press, Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s Ancestral-Wing is a beauty to hold and read. This reviewer is definitely looking forward to reading a full debut collection of work from Kanta in the future. 

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