Claimings and Other Wild Things Poems by Noelle Schmidt

Noelle Schmidt’s debut collection of 44 poems, Claimings and Other Wild Things, is a brave and tender exploration of personal struggle and identity.

The title borrows from one of the longer poems, “Claimings”, an ambitious memoir poem about growing up and feeling unable to claim space in the world. For Schmidt, poetry offers a means to reclaim this space and grapple with everyday wild things like depression, grief, and suicide. But these untamed (and sometimes challenging) stories are accompanied with—in Schmidt’s own words—“… always, always, a little bit of hope”.

As author and essayist Sydney Hegele writes, “Schmidt’s poetry invites us to see body as nature; body as memory; body as machine; body as perpetrator; body as hiding place, a cage made of bones and ligaments”.

In the opening poem “listen” Schmidt describes the many ways we listen with our bodies—

hear with lungs/hear with force of breath/hear with stretch of ribs unfurling petals to the sun/collapsing into centre

This theme of exploring physically continues in “a body”—

a body is swollen with a body’s own secrets/pooling at joints to ache and creak/itching heat caged by a drawbridge tongue

A throughline of this collection is domesticity, but through the lens of trauma—where, amid the ordinariness of lost mittens and broken lampshades, half-buried ghosts live at the edges—

sorry is a waterlogged corpse/dredged from muddy waters
the colour of suicide in spring

References to abuse, suicide, mental illness, and disassociated thoughts wait quietly in unexpected places throughout many of the poems. Schmidt employs both surrealism and the occasional riddle, making some poems more accessible than others, and often begging a second, and maybe third read. But Schmidt’s real strength is using everyday objects to create haunting metaphors—

depression arrived from the bus station
with a suitcase of weapons
without sharp edges: unwelcome, uninvited,
it climbed off the northbound greyhound
and inside my body

Ultimately, Schmidt is reclaiming these life experiences and declaring victory—

with the ghosts of women: we will be dragons
and we will set fire to the men who made us small

Midway through the collection is the deceptively simple poem “dark matters”. In eight achingly beautiful lines Schmidt skillfully marries the physical with emotional longing and the spaciousness of the universe in (to borrow phrases from the poem) a ‘confused love letter’ ‘searching for stardust’. For me, this poem is the heart of the collection.

“breathless”, a poem near the beginning of the book, lays down clear markers—

I want to write a poem about things so beautiful/and
vivid, you touch your fingers to the page and catch your
breath/feel your ghost standing beside me and sud-
denly know what it is

And indeed, much of the writing in this collection is vivid and breath-catching. Schmidt’s haunting images of bodies, histories and landscapes conjure stories of both physicality and domesticity, and how life’s obstacles inform the experience of being human.

Noelle Schmidt is a queer, non-binary poet. Claimings and Other Wild Things is their debut collection. They live in Sudbury, Ontario with their partner and two cats.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Latitude 46 (April 21 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 72 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1988989434
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1988989433

Catherine Walker

Catherine Walkeris a writer/editor living on the South Shore of Miꞌkmaꞌki (Nova Scotia). A founding member of the Little Books Collective, a community-building micropress in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Catherine is the author of two chapbooks: Short Takes: My seven-week career in the film biz (2024) and the call of many sorrows: fourteen poems (2023).