REVIEWER: Wendy Donawa is grateful to live on the unceded territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt peoples, and to see the Salish Sea and the Sooke Hills from the window over her desk. Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions is her second collection.
Poet Wendy Donawa
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.
september 2024: selina boan
“THE INTERNET’S ADVICE ON HOW TO SURVIVE THE APOCALYPSE IS A HOT MESS/”
In my apartment, floor
nails drag my socks apart.
Twitter keeps telling me,
we are all going to die.
On google, how to exist
to the end of the world.
Better to bring an aloe vera plant
than a dog or cat. Better
a can opener than a key.
My body is rejecting parts
of itself. Two bug bites
puffed on my hip
growing a lake of dead cells.
To survive, don’t worry
about canned food or arrows.
Leave the city and don’t
listen to lists on the internet.
There’s a hurricane
everyday under our beds.
There are more chickens
than people in the world.
There is a way our bodies
fill with smoke and signal
warning. If you send me
a screenshot of your heart
I’ll do my best
to save it
Selina Boan
Selina Boan is a white settler-nehiyaw (Cree) writer and educator living on the traditional, unceded territories of thexʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-waututh), and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) peoples.
Her debut poetry collection, Undoing Hours, won the 2022 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English. Her work has been published widely, including The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and 2020. She is a poetry editor for CV2.
Unpacking “THE INTERNET’S ADVICE ON HOW TO SURVIVE THE APOCALYPSE IS A HOT MESS/” by Selina Boan.
Humour can be a sharp instrument, and Selina Boan uses it like a scalpel. Her tragi-comic contradictions ricochet through this poem’s short abrupt couplets. The narrator is fully aware of the absurdity of internet advice; the title tells us upfront that it’s a “hot mess.” But she questions the literal grounding of her life, as unreliable as the floor’s nails that snag her socks.
Seen by followers as a source of wisdom and guidance, Twitter insists mass extinction is inevitable, while Google instructs explicitly how to “exist to the end of the world.” Patently absurd advice recommending care for a plant rather than a cat or dog suggests a diminished range of compassion, relationship, and responsibility. “Better a can opener than a key”? A can opener gives access to a minimal meal, not very nutritious; a key suggests openness, a portal to opportunity, new experience.
The poem’s tone shifts after first three end-stopped “instructive” couplets, while the enjambment of the rest of the poem increases a flow of energy, common sense, and Boan’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humour and off-beat images. With mock-seriousness, she presents a bug-bite on the bum as though it were of existential importance. Her advice about the apocalypse? Ignore the internet’s lists; get away from big-city concerns. Get a sense of proportion: more chickens than people? So what? Irrational fears, hurricanes under the bed? Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom.
The speaker returns to the body’s instinctive wisdom: “there is a way our bodies/…signal.” Poets have always known this, turning to the eternal verities of love and care. Nearly two centuries have passed since Mathew Arnold wrote “Ah, Love/ let us be true to one another.” Selina Boan takes a different route, but arrives at a similar destination: “If you send me/a screenshot of your heart/I’ll do my best/to save it.”
Wendy Donawa Unpacking the Poem©