Cultivating a ‘thirst for change’
Speech Dries Here on the Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health
by (eds.) Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland
Guelph: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025
$20.00 / 9780889844902
Reviewed by Mary Ann Moore
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We live in an age of unprecedented environmental crises, which the editors of Speech Dries Here on the Tongue touch on in their book’s preface. Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland note disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and how governments fail marginalized communities. In Canada as well, the lack of clean drinking water on Indigenous reserves is an example of what they refer to as “environmental racism.” Also in Canada, and in British Columbia specifically, they observe that emergency doctors “have reported a rise in climate-related anxiety and suicide, especially after events like the wildfires that devastated Lytton and impacted Kamloops.”
Despite news like that, we retain agency amid the destruction, the editors state. “Poetry can serve as a space to envision alternative futures,” they write, “creating room for collective dreaming and transformation.” And, they add: “Though the weight of environmental collapse may sometimes silence us, we are called to speak. Even as speech may dry on the tongue, it gives us a thirst for change.”
The editors and contributors to Speech Dries Here on the Tongue have a wealth of knowledge and lived experience. Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer whose memoir, Fuse, is about mixed-race identity and mental health. A multimedia artist and musician Rasiqra Revulva edited Watch Your Head: A Call to Action, a climate crisis anthology. Amanda Shankland is a post-doctoral research fellow whose work explores the intersections of environmental justice, water policy, and community resilience.
While poet contributors from across Canada navigate struggles with depression and anxiety, particularly in urban environments, they offer an opportunity to foster connections with others with similar experiences. That’s what I see as the main purpose, and gift, of this book.
A line from Khashayar Mohammadi’s “Movement XV” gives the book its title. The queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based poet refers to not adhering to the DAFFODILS style guide with his recollection of a past life as “the tribe’s greatest speaker.”
I don’t know of the “DAFFODILS style guide” except for what comes to mind in the form of restrictions and judgement imposed by others. Daffodils, usually a sign of hope in spring may be possible, but not here, according to the speaker: “DAFFODILS don’t grow here anymore / speech dries here on the tongue.”
In “Movement XVI,” a prose poem, the speaker exclaims: “I have crumbled my hopes into crumbs / and fed them to the ducks.”
In the book’s Introduction Karen Houle writes about mental health and poetry by describing a dying rubber plant belonging to someone named Sean who lives in a house off Stone Road in Guelph, Ontario.
“How are you feeling?” Houle asks the reader as she poses more questions related to this “plant tale,” such as: “Where was this potting soil ‘made’?” She states, “Like it or not, every choice we make, every thing we own, every action we take, every thought or idea we have, and every sound or word we utter or write or read, has ecological and political and material and emotional webs of interconnections….”
“Noticing” and “caring” are among the capacities particular to humans and we can develop them, according to Houle, a retired philosophy professor. “One little sick houseplant being noticed and responded to by us—us—is itself a living moment, a good moment.” It is as critical that we respond, Houle asserts, to the houseplant event as it is to the event of “the Columbia Icefield glacier retreating to rubble.”
Poetry could be what helps us “notice and care about your houseplant, or your roommates, or your planet,” Houle contends. Poetry “draws us closes to their subject, expanding empathy and curiosity through nearness.”
While hope can be about caring—realizing ourselves as “co-participants,” as Houle writes—Aaron Kreuter in his prose poem “Bad Moon Rising” declares:
Time to pick a new mantra. Is
this the world my inaction has built?
I can’t help but think of Joanna Macy, scholar of Buddhism and deep ecology, who refers to having a clear view of reality in her 2012 book, Active Hope. The poets in this anthology have done that, but I didn’t get the sense that they identified what they hope for—or the steps they may take to move themselves in that direction.
Gary Barwin and Elee Kraljii Gardiner, who became Vancouver’s Poet Laureate in 2025, contribute a series of poems including “The Eye You See,” which refers to
A handful of birds in a bath of milk
hope a century wide
a squinty poison
An image entitled “Riven Museum” is of a waterfall made of words. It’s from Watcher, an excerpt of a longer collaboration by the pair. (QR code poems in the forthcoming chapbook take readers to videos of images, music, and sound.)
gregor Y kennedy, who lives and works as a retreat facilitator at the Ignatius Jesuit Centre in Guelph (where I once spent a lot of time writing) contributed poems titled “Anxiety,” “bipolar,” and “Too Hot” as well as “Prayer in the Age of Climate Change.” The latter poem begins:
All will be well
Warbles the nuthatch from Norwich
In bird language
We don’t understand.
The stanza is reminiscent of the words of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century reclusive mystic. Later in the poem, the speaker tells of
a certain patch of trilliums
On the brink of blooming
Who gesture with three green hands
A universal sign of hope.
So true.
And equally
Not far away
The forest fires
Have never raged so wild
So early.
The editors refer to an interplay between hope and despair in their preface. In the case of the words above, the word “equally” points out how we hold both: trilliums blooming hope and forest fires raging disaster.
Among the startling lines, Tara McGowan-Ross, an urban Mi’kmaq writer and artist, writes in “If I had a son I would call him Ben,” are:
When I arrive on the other coast I am readied only
for horrors, which makes me vulnerable to the
beauty of things.
In the last stanza following a long pause in the line, these haunting words:
When I arrive
in the burnt forest I am ashamed to find it beautiful.
Full of fire-scarred horses and their perfect children
who don’t know any other way for things to be.
Fiona Tinwei Lam’s “Three Senryu” are, in structure, the same as the Japanese form of haiku but with a focus on human nature. Here’s an example of that human nature:
i
BC wildfire haze
blends with contrails: Maui-bound
vacationers doze.
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Fire and rain. Despair and hope. So as not to overwhelm, think back to that houseplant and our inter-connections through our noticing. That’s what I got out of this collection. While I believe poetry can be transformative in the writing of it, re-imagining for instance, or in the reading of it, something resonates with us—I didn’t sense much of a “space to envision alternative futures” in this anthology, which the editors refer to in their preface.
We can share vulnerabilities, as the poets have done in Speech Dries Here on the Tongue. What else can we do to become actively hopeful?
In “Small Talk,” mononymous poet Grace adds some lightness to her poem with its beginning couplets:
How do you tell someone
is from Vancouver?
We’re always talking
about the rain.
In “Be Water,” the speaker, is “trying / to be water” while referring to the forest fires “every summer now.” Grace borrowed the idea of highlighting Chinese characters with the “water radical from Vancouver-based Lydia Kwa’s “Water”:
in my language, water’s character
is a radical: 氵
there is no living 活
no clarity 清
no romance 浪漫
without water
The final words of her poem offer some of the envisioning I was hoping for:
In another life
the earth doesn’t know
the meaning of thirst
and we gather
and celebrate
a downpour
of applause.
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Mary Ann Moore is a poet, writer, and writing mentor who lives on the unceded lands of the Snuneymuxw First Nation in Nanaimo. Her recent chapbook of poems is Modern Words for Beauty (house of appleton). Moore leads writing circles and has two writing resources: Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey (International Association for Journal Writing) and Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice (Flying Mermaids Studio). [Editor’s note: Mary Ann Moore has also reviewed books by Kate Braid, Marie Metaphor Specht, Emily Carr (ed., Ann-Lee Switzer), Aislinn Hunter (ed.), Emma FitzGerald, Susan Alexander & Lorraine Gane, and Judy LeBlanc for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster
