unpacking the poem:
Regional reviewers focus on regional poems

Reviewer Wendy Donawa unpacks a different poem every month. She examines the poem in a way she hopes is helpful for readers and other poets to understand how craft works in a particular poem, for a particular effect.

REVIEWER:
Wendy Donawa calls Victoria home, and is grateful to live on the unceded  lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Her prior life included 36 years in Barbados, as a UWI student, a Barbados Community College instructor, and a Barbados Museum curator.

Her first book, Thin Air of the Knowable (BrickBooks, 2017), was a finalist for the Raymond Souster award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Our Bodies Unanswered Questions (Frontenac House) followed in 2021. Her poems are also found in anthologies and magazines including Arc Poetry Magazine, The New Quarterly, Canadian Review of Books, Prairie Fire, Literary Review of Canada, Plenitude, Room, Freefall, and online Poetry Pause.

Poet Wendy Donawa