Fast Commute

A Poem

by Laurie D. Graham

tagged: canadian, women authors

Description

Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Finalist
A powerful book-length poem on environmental destruction and the violences of colonial nation-states from the acclaimed author of Settler Education.

Here is a lament for places in flux, where industrial, commercial, or suburban development encroaches or invades. From Highway 401 to Refinery Row east of Edmonton, from Lake Ontario to the Fraser River, this long poem takes aim at the structures that support ecological injustice and attempts new forms of expression grounded in respect for flora, fauna, water, land, and air. It also wrestles with the impossibility of speaking ethically about “the environment” as a settler living within and benefiting from the will to destroy that so often doubles as nationalism.

Following physical routes and terrains, Fast Commute exists both within and outside the dissociative registers of colonialism and capitalism. This deeply engaging book offers a way to see, learn about, and live in relationship with other-than-human life, and to begin dealing with loss on a grand scale.

About the Author

Laurie D. Graham

Contributor Notes

Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta). She currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Her second book, Settler Education, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Most recently, her third collection, Fast Commute, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, won the Thomas Morton Poetry Prize, and appeared in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. Laurie’s maternal family comes from around Derwent, Alberta, by way of Ukraine and Poland, and her paternal family comes from around Semans, Saskatchewan, by way of Northern Ireland and Scotland. She has about a century of history in Canada.

Editorial Review

Praise for Laurie D. Graham and Fast Commute
“[A]n urgent lament for all we are losing. [Fast Commute] is both an attempt to speak with clarity to the unspeakable, and a realistic look at what settler life is continuing to wreak upon our world. It is a collection of poetry that deeply engages the reader in a vital exploration of the destruction of the environment, while at the same time forging startling new language to honor the very landscape under threat. ”—Trillium Award, Jury Citation

“Fast Commute is an inventory, a checklist of damages. The book describes the honest face of our culture’s ‘myth of unlimited growth’ and catalogues the scars and desecrations all around us—from strip malls to oil refineries (with their ‘manufactured cloud formations’) to residential schools. Yet in the middle of these lists and all this damage are glimpses of something real, even sacred.'” —Alberta Views
"The incantatory verses in Fast Commute cast a circle of heightened attention, in which it is safe to confront all that we avoid in our distracted lives. It is made of scenes and fragments that at first throb with alienation and grief for all we have done to harm the more-than-human world, until the steady accretion of images and language conjures a spell calling us to right relationship and protecting us from the acedia that comes with living in colonized landscapes. Those who are comfortable in the world, will be disturbed by these verses; those already disturbed will take comfort in them." --Trevor Herriot, author of Islands of Grass
“Graham has set herself a vital moral task: actually to see the fantastic violence of resourcist culture, its appalling and unremitting abuse of the land, and to name the cultural forces that render that vast degradation almost invisible, reduce it to a blur on the edge of our fast commute. She has produced a work of unflinching, articulate witness. A keening, at once precise and profound.” —Jan Zwicky

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