UNMET: poems by stephanie roberts

Having read and loved rushes from the river disappointment by stephanie roberts (McGill-Queens, 2020) I was looking forward to her next work, which is UNMET (Biblioasis, 2025), releasing April 1, 2025. The wait was well worth it. Both are reread-worthy.

The previous title was very marked up, as I did with this one. In her previous, I was lit up by sad pining phrasings “would I sing of incorruptible grief” and “you fall/into the fork of my branched weight” and “gold-plated carelessness broke something in her.” It was marked by aching and longing and density of language, freshness of metaphor. In “Make the Next Second Chance,” in her previous book she wrote, “We make a second chance against what/autumn removed. I dare to unzip your spring/sliding hand down the crevice of your soul”

As if continuing where that poem touched, in her Covid lockdown collection of UNMET, in one of the title poems entitled “Unmet”, “you look over your glasses & I slip/shoulder straps over hills down valley”. The sensualness is bright and glittering and not stilted mechanical by overly precise literal description, which is where poetry leaks in.

It’s lovely to read a collection and not once be pestered by the question, why is this a poem? Like her previous poems are not facile or conversational narratives. They are dense and intense. I thought the poems in UNMET have a wider range of tones and forms than her previous but on rereading her previous, it is remarkable how the books gives itself over to seeing entirely different aspects pop out. Still UNMET seems somehow more tethered to the concrete, less internal, more engaging with wider social situations, whether words of anaesthetist or drywaller, immediate or wider societal conversation. A constancy is her vitality of alert, surprising, and precise language.

In “The Process” (p. 29): “Flippant one day/Evasive the next, you are a fool,/ Of gently shrugging shoulders, trying/To tie cats’ tails together into certainty.” The more I reread in parallel the more the poems seem built in the same universe, a different terrain but extending the same world. In rushes from the river disappointment she bridges the leaps of metonym and metaphor from watching a World War II movie together “watching American square jaws save the free world” as “internal commotion/knocks like unbalanced laundry” (In “If we are Savage & Lucky”).

Likewise in UNMET, she has a way to speak that I can say I’ve never heard or conceived of that before. She added furniture to my head with “Mall of the sirens” (p. 16) when she said, “wishes grew overly precious/like a tongue covers decay in tooth. Desire, wish/ & will fought like tights in the laundry”. There may be no new human experience and yet a wish as opposed to action as a sort of decay is a frame that I don’t think earlier centuries would have made or conflicting demands have inner and outer fighting and tangling like laundry.

My cynical thought of “nothing new under the sun” is called out in “Black Conversation (p. 33-34) about white appropriation of Black voices twists to reference the French Revolution in the last line. It’s a colonial entitlement and perceptual filter to expect to only see more of the same. Different lives create different ideologies. If we only hear certain stories, we all lose richness. There is not one narrative. Each person creates and is created by their immediate.

roberts relates calling the police in affordable housing and doesn’t need to set up foreshadowing for how badly that went, like the popular quote by Tristan Snell goes, “First they came for the immigrants, and I spoke out, because l’ve read the damn poem before and I know how it ends.” roberts nimbly and ably writes in many tones. (p. 36-37)

"A poet calls himself a mystic.
I don't know what he means 
but it is something certain
literary yt men 
call themselves"

What does a poem do? Witness. Insist. Insist on speaking. in a poem, she (fucking irate) gestures to maidenhair fern” (p. 39). Let in the whole relevant world, not just pretty bits. “I was going to get at those taxes/violate a fine day with drudgery.” It continues (p. 41),

"I woke to the picture of you, my lighthouse
apple tree, ladder, smiling, a radiance like
answered prayer. Shine
in your remote location, safe from mask & glove.
My father died yesterday & how on brand,
taking leave in the midst of disaster."

What a series of unexpected yet perfectly executed turns. The “like” hanging at line’s end as if taking an extra beat to find a comparison before landing on it. A photo summarized so completely yet succinctly, emulating the way the eye moves quickly over the familiar. What is the context? Is she in hospital as patient or visitor? Far from the loved one, but tethered connection met though physically not meeting. That acerbic turn of attention to father, from genuine chosen family, supportive love, to legal duty to family. Its concise timing throws those into high contrast.

I love that she lets her wit into the rooms she builds as well as her frustration, anger, fear, humour, tenderness and hope. She admirably permits wide swathes of herself on the page, yet without being didactic or maudlin and without overwriting. The poetry is by turns vulnerable, and fierce, and even lets in a memento poem of her grandmother with her crisp adage “You are well, not fine. Fine is for sugar!” (p.18). It feels somehow a peak behind the curtain of context when the main view is from the narrator’s interior world. That adage sticks in my head.

The ending came as a surprise. As a cook who doesn’t read all the way though the recipe before beginning, with a book of 124 pages, the poems ended at p. 109, but with a sense of closure and completeness. The sample notes also a pleasure to go through, even if I remain disappointed by the disclosure in the end notes that I Gotta Get Me Some™ chocolate sauce “is an invention of the author. Desolé.” Someone should get on that.

stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment, a Quebec Writers’ Federation finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, a recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence, and a Canada Council of the Arts grantee. Her work has been critically praised and featured in well over one hundred periodicals and anthologies, in print and online, throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a citizen of Canada, Panama, and the US, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.

Publisher: Biblioasis (April 1, 2025)
Paperback: 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 124 pages
ISBN: 9781771966573

Pearl Pirie

Website

Pearl Pirie's latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet