With reviews of chapbooks by Jack Daniel Christie, A. Daniyal, and Kit Roffey.
Bay of Pigs Vol 1: Contra & Bay of Pigs and Vol 2: Stormwatch by Jack Daniel Christie (Discordia Review, 2025)
What does it mean to write a political poem? And does the political lyric dispute, challenge or support the idea that every poem is political? When I read Bay of Pigs Vol 1: Contra and Vol 2: Stormwatch by Jack Daniel Christie it got me thinking about the role of the poem, the poet, and language in our society. How every poem, whether explicitly stated or not, is a political statement. Quiet or loud, poetry can use language in a way to hold space, create it, share it, open it, and more often than we’d care to admit take it away. Language is political and poetry is the alchemy of language, which for many of us, makes poetry an art of rebellion and resistance.
Language is political and poetry is the alchemy of language.
Bay of Pigs Vol 1 & 2 is a two part political lyric. The chapbooks are a delight to read together, they lean artfully into their theme, fully embracing their concept with a willingness to play and explore without hesitation. Christie pulls from a wide lens of US imperialism, politics, history and pop culture. With urgency, flare, and even great comedic timing, Christie tells us of Diddy and his crew, Israel, Ukraine, Ground Zero, political figures, political bodies, “Misinformation? / Bitch, this IS information!” and Ghislaine Maxwell as “Underage girls fall from the sky / like mana.”
Reading Bay of Pigs, I kept thinking about desensitization, how we often numb ourselves to the horrors on our phones as we scroll past them. Christie doesn’t allow you to turn away. His chapbooks demand presence, attention, and awareness of the world we live in. Christie’s voice has a sass, wit, and sharpness that makes it impossible to ignore. Bay of Pigs is authentic, humorous, and relatable. “There are days I feel everything. / There are days I feel nothing. / There are days where “feeling” is suspect. / I didn’t sign up for this.” Christie’s speaker is honest, he doesn’t sugarcoat, doesn’t dance around what is and as long as the book is in your hands he’ll tell you “You learned the facts because they had to be known. / You did the work because it had to be done. / Genocide by television? / It’s more likely than you think!”
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Jack Daniel Christie is a writer, artist, journalist, and law school student of mixed Anishinaabe and Métis descent, living in Montreal, Canada. His journalism appears in Canadian Dimension, while his prose and poetry has been featured in Commo, Bad Nudes, and Calliope, to name a few. He was shortlisted for the Irving Layton Award in the Fiction category, and is the editor-in-chief of the poetry zine press and event series Discordia Review, which you can follow at @discordia.review on Instagram.
Clean Ponds by A. Daniyal (Cactus Press, 2025)
We often hear that good poetry bears witness. I believe this, but as the world evolves so does our relationship with poetry, as do our needs, desires, and demands from it. I think a good poem serves as a mirror. It reflects the world we live in and allows us to see ourselves and others in it. Witnessing with reflection. When combined, these can incite action, inspiration, empathy, contemplation and possibility. Why else would we go to poetry in our most private and vulnerable moments?
Clean Ponds by A. Daniyal evokes a similar sentiment in me. The world reflected feels eerily familiar yet completely new. In Ceasefire, the speaker says “Here I hear the hiss / of the room heater, / I let myself melt / in its merciful warmth.” Clean Ponds is written in straightforward language. The poems don’t dance around what they’re trying to say as they navigate war and destruction against the backdrop of yesterday and today. “A lone warplane screeching / shattering the sound barrier, / batters an omen / against the eardrums / of mutilated youth.”
Clean Ponds is intense yet necessary, especially considering today’s political climate. I admire the emotional progression in the sequencing, how the poetry never shies away from the challenging subject matter and never really dissolves hope. That’s what makes Clean Ponds feel all the more three dimensional. It’s laced with yearning, hope, and nostalgia at the same time as being incredibly heavy.
In the Acknowledgements section, I noticed how much this book grew out of community. Daniyal’s Clean Ponds is a reminder that our poetry has to be part of something. Through poems that are grounded, that feel real and lived in, the speaker tells us “I scrape away the withered leaves / and sit on the tracks that lead into the fog, / the rotting iron fence crooked and bent / like vultures hunched on carrion.” Daniyal’s chapbook reminds us the power of poetry when there’s connection. His poems make us pay attention and reflect, they ask us to “wonder / if there’s any sense / in living one day / and then just going away / like nothing ever happened.”
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A. Daniyal was born in 1989 in Lahore, Pakistan.
Body Thought by Kit Roffey (Anstruther Press, 2025)
Kit Roffey’s Body Thought is a slim collection of poems and illustrations that navigate conversion disorder. The chapbook got me thinking about disability, visibility, of being seen and heard, believed and understood, medical systems, empathy, grief and the body, and how all these things tangle and web together. Body Thought intersects queerness and disability and does a powerful job at centering disability, the body and the complex, layered experience of existing
“as the body / protests this (my) history”
I’m going to go on a little side quest here. When reading Body Thought I kept recalling Tea Gerbeza’s full-length collection How I Bend Into More. There’s a lot of similarities and obvious differences, but I’m going to focus on why I kept making this connection. Both books center and explore disability, but what solidified the connection for me was how both poets effectively used multimedia to create an experimental, symbiotic poetic experience. So, the very hungry, greedy poetry monster in me thought: What would Body Thought look like as a full length collection? Roffey’s chapbook contains these gorgeous, haunting linocut illustrations that seamlessly converse with the poems they’re sandwiched between. The illustrations echo lines and images, leading to smooth, unexpected, intriguing reading.
For the poems themselves, I loved the recurring imagery of competing colours and textures juxtaposed against each other. Cold and snow against heat and fire, hues of blue contrasted against heat. “Relight the candle smoke. Gawk at the blueness / of my skin when it crusts over. I combust, I pool.” Roffey incorporates a lot of texture in their poems, a lot of vivid sensory writing. “Burning up like debris (extremities frigid as care) I lean / engulfed & pulsating. My aura convulses”. This made me think: How do you make an invisible illness visible? How do you make it tangible? For medical professionals? For the folks around you? For readers? Roffey’s poetry gives language to disability that is often looked through instead of looked at. “Don’t get it / strange, I / was never / a spine / the way / a spine is / supposed / to be. Low / threshold, nerve- / memory / perfect…”
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Kit Roffey is a queer, trans, and disabled writer and artist based out of London, Ontario CA (the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak and Attawandaron.) Their work often explores the themes of disability, grief, and queerness in relation to the natural sphere. They were the winner of the 2021 Antler River Poetry contest and their work has appeared in Vallum, Event, Grain, and Yolk among other publications. Their first chapbook “Civilian of Dirt” came out in 2023 with 845 Press. Their newest work “Body Thought” is out now with Anstruther Press.
Michael Russell (he/they) is the queer, mad mother monster behind two chapbooks, gallery of heartache (forthcoming from 845 Press) and Grindr Opera (Frog Hollow Press). They are the coauthor of chapbook Split Jawed with Elena Bentley (forthcoming from Collusion Books). As always, he thinks you’re fantabulous. Insta: @michael.russell.poet
