In p a u s e. J. R. Carpenter turns the simple act of going for a walk into a radical practice of attention. Written over the course of a year of daily encounters with kisiskâciwanisîpiy (the North Saskatchewan River) as it runs through amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) in Treaty 6 Territory, this long poem listens closely to water and weather, birds and trees, mudstone and ice, while never forgetting that no geology, no language, and no river are neutral.
Written in short, breath-like fragments, p a u s e. drifts between field note, love poem, and land acknowledgement, refusing settled as a genre. Fossils, wildfire haze, trumpeter swans, city traffic, and pandemic loneliness all pass through its pages, as the poem keeps returning to one insistent question: what happens when we treat noticing as a form of care, and listening as a way of giving something back.
About the Author :
J. R. Carpenter is a queer artist, writer, mudlark, fossil hunter, and a lecturer at University of Leeds. Born of migrants in Mi'kma'ki they lived in Tiohtià ke for many years before emigrating to England in 2010. Their work asks questions about place, displacement, colonialism, and climate across performance, print and digital media. For more information visit luckysoap.com
Review :
J. R. Carpenter's elliptical, citational p a u s e interrogates, with icy precision, colonial imposition and the appropriation and overwriting of Indigenous territories in western Canada, where 'even this dust. is a settler.' This abundant book-length poem - think Don Mee Choi meets Alice Oswald - raises questions about nationhood, ecology and imperialism. On each page of this concentrated eco-social geography, Carpenter compels us to pause, to pay attention to how the world is formed and be fuller for it.
- Tom Branfoot
In Space and Place Yi--Fu Tan writes: "if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place." It is possible then to conceive of place as pause. This is what J.R. Carpenter explores in her 'sustained engagement with the kisiskâciwanisîpiy (the North Saskatchewan River) as it flows east through amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton)'. Written in a temporary dwelling during the pause of Covid times, the essence of the pause here is in the honest, slow, and loving learning of a place, conveyed through the language of attention, the form of the text, the graphic signs and punctuation, and space on the page. More than landscape, pause is also waterscape and icescape approached with the sensitivity of a writer equally aware of colonial and natural histories, a serious, though also witty, visitor or pauser in place.
- Harriet Tarlo
