“The eternal silences of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
— Pascal, Pensées, 206.
Karen Solie’s latest poetry collection Wellwater begins underground, in the invisible spaces where secrets, pasts, and toxins seethe in their forgotten worlds. Earlier this year, the AP reported on a new “crisis” among rural communities across the US as families consume and bathe in well water contaminated with PFAS. Nicknamed “forever chemicals,” PFAS are synthetic carbon-fluoride bonds that are extraordinarily resistant, making them an ideal candidate for a wide-range of objects, from non-stick cookware (think Teflon pans) and tablecloths, to athletic clothing, cosmetics, and period pads. The temporal duration of industrial toxins is both awesome and destabilizing: the half-life of plutonium-239 (nonexistent prior to 1945) is estimated to be around 24,000 years; my single-use plastic water bottle will outlive me. And yet, PFAS signify something slightly different: while plastic and nuclear isotopes cause proliferating damage with long temporal profiles, they do decay. But the carbon-fluoride bonds that make up PFAS do not. And, as a result, they accumulate—in soils, groundwater, food, and bodies. Invisible and molecular, carbon-fluoride bonds evade detection and endure forever.
Leading us through a series of abandoned, evacuated, and gentrified spaces, Solie’s collection presents a landscape of profound contamination, where bodies, homes and even time itself has become porous, invaded by but also enmeshed with others. Throughout, Solie is concerned with what it means to leave an impression upon the world: in the objects we use and then discard, in the fertilizers applied to soils, in the land transformed into a grid, and in the marks we leave on others. In “The Grasslands,” Solie imagines “The best thing for it may be that we are not there,” and yet in “Foxes,” the speaker grieves her lack of presence, writing, “My host would write of me online later/it was as though no one had ever been here.” The finitude of human presence is mourned in a landscape irrevocably changed by the infinitude of human action. Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Solie returns to the haunts of her childhood in Wellwater, as well as to the Toronto of her past and the England of her present, to ask what are the possibilities of return to a time before—before the death of a loved one, before chemicals and colonization, before humans walked the earth—and would we even want that?
A professor once described the form of Proust’s Swann’s Way to me as a staircase: the narrative loops back on itself but with deviations that move us upwards to land in a slightly different place each time. I think of Wellwater similarly: we begin in “Basement Suite” and clamber up, turning back to Moose Jaw, childhood, and old apartments in Toronto, until we reach “Canopy.” Back once more in Solie’s childhood, “Canopy” releases us from the underground world and into the air, liberated if only slightly, from a fixed past. Much like the carbon-fluoride bonds in our bodies, Solie’s poems accumulate across the page as objects and places iterate in loops that diverge instead of replicate. While the conditions of Solie’s world have not changed, her speaker has found a way to move around within these limitations, to recognize that the road from her childhood may have been “widened” and that “The heavy equipment passes/beneath them more often now,” but that the same cottonwoods remain, somehow “in excess/of their average lifespan/and function.”
But if Solie finds optimism in the cottonwood’s unexpected lifespan, elsewhere in Wellwater, this longevity remains tempered by the radical disciplining of plant life. In “Red Spring,” she maps out an uncanny prairie landscape, where “lakes, rivers, sloughs” are not nurturing but instead “holes in the cloth of settlement,” and where plants grow only in the ways made possible by chemical application. In stanzas whose neatness mimics the measured furrows of monocultural agriculture, Solie traces how the chemical conglomerate Bayer “(née Monsanto)” has transformed prairie agriculture into a carefully controlled assembly line. Bayer’s genetically modified seeds—that farmers are legally forbidden from replanting—not only require a careful application of “LuxxurTM for problematic grass weeds” and “ProsaroTM, FolicurTM,” but are engineered to thrive with Monsanto’s own Roundup weed killer, or, as “Red Spring” describes it, “They are literally/made for each other.” While Roundup nurtures its cyborgian offspring, elsewhere it kills and debilitates; DeWayne Johnson, a gardener Solie named in the poem was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after years of exposure to Roundup and successfully sued Monsanto for $21 million. Just this April, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Monsanto v. Durnell as Bayer, backed by the current administration, seeks to refute its liability for Roundup exposure and thereby overturn nearly 100,000 successful lawsuits, including Johnson’s. In this “Red Spring,” ruled over by plant modification and conglomerate sovereignty, all Solie can do is despair:
Just like the GMO seeds, every aspect of our material lives—what we eat, wear, how we heat our houses and charge our phones —is regulated and controlled by “a hidden machinery” that hides behind its “grey facilities,” name changes and false promises. Solie’s grief echoes in her iterated apologies—“I don’t know how to make this beautiful”—as she regards an agricultural landscape irrevocably tied to the “zombie technology” of genetic modification and chemical growth now impossible to escape.
The persistence of chemicals in soil and seeds conflicts with all the things that are painfully finite in Solie’s world. In “Toronto the Good,” Solie describes the apartments she used to inhabit, with their “flakeboard, caulkstrip, Mactac, plastic,” now transformed after “the renovictions” into “custom cabinets, subway tile, to-code wiring and ventilation/deemed wasted on us lot.” In “Next Life,” we enter the home of someone deceased to glimpse the unusable fragments of their life. These objects cannot be given away or passed down because “The world/used her right up, along with the little she’d been given.” Where Solie departs the house in “Next Life” carrying nothing of value, she instead enters a different space in “The Bluebird” cluttered with all the things the “former tenants have found wanting.” As we migrate from “renovicted” apartments along highways and memories and into other rentals, Solie crafts a transitory subject uprooted and displaced in a world that seems to inhibit rootedness.
While rarely at home in any given place, Solie comes to establish relations not with people but with all the objects they have left behind. In “Basement Suite,” Solie observes “the fixtures and appliances/repented of by the homeowners/who don’t realize this is a way to know them,” as using and touching things become a mode of intimacy with their former user. All the objects discarded, forgotten, but also inherited in Wellwater point ultimately to a world in which nothing can ever be discarded: when we throw a plastic container into the trash, it might get broken down or re-shaped, but it will never completely disappear. In their book Hyperobjects, the philosopher Timothy Morton describes how there is no ‘throwing away’ anymore in the Anthropocene: “instead of the mythical land Away, we know the waste goes to the Pacific Ocean or the wastewater treatment facility… There is no Away on this surface, no here and no there” (31). Similarly, in Wellwater, there is no “Away” for waste, toxins, objects or even memories: what we try to abandon, someone else will have to inherit. Such a reality inhibits our ability for renewal—for wiping the slate clean—but it also embeds us in landscapes and histories that far exceed our own lives. As the speaker declares in “Yarrow,” “There is no starting over/never has been.”
In Solie’s world of contamination, pollution, and transience, the discrete Enlightenment subject—the human form that is whole, discrete and singular—is nothing more than illusion. The human body is also porous and thereby vulnerable to all kinds of material transgressions: the “Blue light” in “Bad Landscape” that presumed to be merely “outside/was already on the inside, the radiation we were told was everywhere”; or even in “Smoke,” where the ash from a forest fire is “particulate/of houses, plants, animals.” The ravages of environmental violence break down bodies, houses, and even forms as nonhuman life invades and exceeds all human attempts to curtail it. Such porosity applies not just to bodies but also to space where, in “Parables of the Rat,” the speaker shares both house and food with a rodent as the two are described “like brothers.” In the poem “The Mash,” Solie takes us to a swamp as a borderland between two discrete ecologies—land and water—otherwise known as an ecotone. Here, poetic form re-enacts the marshy borderlands as the blank space between words and lines threatens to engulf what is written. Termed “mash” in Newfoundland, as well as,
the landscape evades description just as it requires its proliferation. The landscape’s inexactness —its inability to maintain a definite form or noun—elicits both frustration and resolution in the speaker who declares “why can’t one thing in this life be clear” only to realize, “As if any of us would want to choose just one thing.” To be porous is to be vulnerable to invasion and contamination, but it is also to be more than one thing—to be both land and water simultaneously. In a moment that feels increasingly dominated by classification—by identities that are fixed and definitive—porosity offers a welcome fluidity.
As a space of exchange, transition and entanglement, the mash allows us to read the collection’s other ecotones as places of transition but also convergence—the rented rooms, the urban landscapes caught between decay and redevelopment. “Foxes” takes us to the aftermath of Storm Dennis, an aberrant tropical cyclone that struck England in 2020 and caused extensive damage. The speaker witnesses the “fallen beech/its roots exposed like the apartment/of somebody who has died/unable to tidy up first,” at dusk, the temporal transition she describes as “that untrustworthy time/when holes appear in the civic fabric.” As the landscape teeters between what it was before disaster struck and what it will become, a door opens and something enters: “when a half door opened at the end/of a darkening corridor they/ran through it.” Whether “characters left over from the séance” or the foxes for whom the poem is titled, they cross into the space and converge upon the solitary speaker, forming relations made possible by the “holes” torn in a stable landscape.
Wellwater yearns for another world, one free from the accumulative disasters of the present. The collection’s ecotonic spaces offer one such alternative, where geographical and temporal ambiguities interrupt the present and afford other possibilities—of relation, being, and perspective. With brief retreats into the wilderness, as in “The Grasslands” where the speaker disappears in a world of deep time and solitude, Solie ultimately returns to gentrified city blocks and damaged rooms. For Solie, such landscapes are inescapable and yet simultaneously articulate an enmeshed subjectivity—a personhood whose narratives are inextricable from the toxic mess we have inherited. In the penultimate poem “Starcraft,” Solie modifies her desire for another world to “another dimension,” that is “Still of this world, which includes both/what we know and can imagine.” Solie dedicates Wellwater to her recently deceased father, Howard Solie, whose presence echoes throughout this collection. The other “dimension” that Solie glimpses in “Starcraft” is wherever Howard Solie resides now, a place always proximal to the living as whatever divides the past and the present is porous and easily transgressed. In its fluidity, this past is no longer an entrapment—as it was in “Basement Suite”—or a haunting, but a refuge Solie can choose to inhabit.
Discussing the impact of environmental toxins on human timescales, the sociologist Barbara Adam writes that “gone is the simple world of linear causal links between input and output, of proportional relations between action and effect, of human timescales for political planning horizons.” Instead, toxins such as PFAS often remain dormant for long periods of time before emerging in bodies and environments, travelling long distances to appear in ways that refute linearity. Without clear causality between exposure and effect, individuals or even whole communities are cast adrift from medical diagnoses, accountability and from the certainty of a safe world. In WellWater, every space—homes, gardens, or even memory—might become a source of harm. Solie’s speaker, adrift in time and space, inhabits a world without linearity. And yet, for Solie, the instability of time and space is both threatening and recuperative when it means that past events, lost objects, or even absent people might linger as traces in the present. In a world damaged by accumulation, what is before is never truly gone but instead always just beneath.
Sarah Hopkinson is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Harvard University. She teaches and writes on plants, mud, and animals in anglophone literature. Every summer, she re-reads Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians just so she can cry.
Article Photo: George Stonehill, Joseph Fisher Estate, ca. 1936 via Public Domain Review