The Woodlot

by Pearl Pirie

The 111-page collection Seed Beetle: Poems by Mahaila Smith (Stelliform Press, 2025) starts with a foreword, but don’t skip it, if that is your habit. It explains the biography for this posthumous collected works of biologist Nebula Armis, born in 2033, who would go on to win the Utopic Robotic-sponsored International Space Station’s Writers Retreat in 2056.

Here we start in a time capsule from the future containing what will feel salient from one poet’s life. What are the rules in the future?

        All your objects will outlive you.
	Here they are,
	haunting your line of sight.
	So set them aflame.

	"An Invitation to Burn", (p. 18-19)

A brash start after an opening poem from the corporation. It is fitting since in the world humans come second after the machine needs of economy. It intrigues from the get-go.

It’s contrariness against expectation is richly detailed. The poems are gathered from the archive of the Toronto Public Library by the poet’s partner, Dip, in 2102. It is a fun dig against our apocalyptic saints that libraries and poetry will remain intact, no matter what comes.

And how can you not love a poem which is entitled “Hi! I am your Cortical Update!”? It is gratifying to read what you haven’t read before. I can open at any page and find something striking, unforeseen and deftly worded. For example, a swimming poem, “To Clear My Mind”, on p. 74:

       I am compressed movement
	suspended for a second
	in a nautilus like spiral.

It’s poetry but also novel-like in being about a story not only talking about a situation. Novelist Jessica Brody described the novel as characteristically being at two levels, external journey and internal change because of the journey. There’s a gratifying arc moving through isolation to community. It’s about living in an ecologically and socially damaged place, marked by relationship-strain and conflict, unexpected twists, and finding a new invigorating resolution.

The book is in three sections: Gemmy (the speaker’s mother), Nebby (the speaker) and The Reunion. The poems move from irritated and punchy to lyrically lovely. I don’t want to add spoilers so you can experience it yourself, but here’s an excerpt from “Babel”, where structurally the rooms/stanzas of the poem are solid and comforting then strand out towards something more vulnerable. on p. 68-69:

       Remember being with your mother, 
	with her wife, sitting together outside 
	and watching the sun go down, 
	one or two fireflies 
	winking in the dusky light.

	The night feels so rare and I have nothing to say, 
	holding the image close within myself,

	for generations spooling out towards irrelevance.

I love that queerness and non-binary just is, not called out in neon signs. It’s taken for granted that this is Not an Issue. Nanites, and corporate interest pushing people as far as it can? Those are issues.

Over the length, it reads like a novel and a resistance plan against the status quo. People are trapped in the machine and the consequences of society that predated them. Like Johnny Cash’s “One Piece at a Time”, the change has to be from inside the factory against the power imbalance, seeking allies.

A poem (p. 48) “Threatened” knocks one in the solar plexus no matter how many rereads. The impact is perhaps centred on how the company “budgeted for casualties” and is unconcerned with the seeding bots that are stolen and dissembled for parts, which at that point stop their transmissions of updates directly to the workers’ brains. It contemplates reciprocity of care and loyalty. Does it go without saying that most poems that consider ecological damage foresee no recovery? This world is dangerous and estranged, but human connection persists.

Stelliform Press, which put out Seed Beetle, has a mandate of conversations about culture and climate change. At one level, the characters in these poems of the future are living our consequences: an arid desert, industrially polluted, southern Ontario. It hits harder somehow that it’s local, not projected to another planet or century. It has a realism of alternate history, like War of the Worlds, but of the future.

There has been contemporary speculative poetry since at least Christina Rossetti’s 1862 “Goblin Market”. There’s been formal sci-fi haiku since Tom Brinck’s treatise, “The SciFaiku Manifesto” (July 1995). Terry Pratchett had a SciFi haiku as an epigram in his novel, The Dark Side of the Sun (1976). Scifaikuest magazine has ben going for over 20 years. Not to mislead, Seed Beetle poems aren’t haiku sub-genre and nor are they typical lyric.

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When I think of poetry I think of selecting from and sequestering a past. I try to stay buoyant by being radically present in poetry but that’s sort of improv stasis, isn’t it? With these sci-fi or spec fiction poems it opens options of what we are permitted to think or do in poetry. Poems like these remind us that poems can be whatever you could imagine could happen. Not just surreal’s mandate for the impossible but wider permission.

Verbal terraforming is visible in Seed Beetle. It brings to focus how everything we say in the present is also building the future, how any act cantilevers what will be. Let us not be frivolous with our choices. Often with our poetry we don’t walk far from our foundations of present day, not daring to go out onto that cantilevered beam of where what we’ve built might extend.

The theme of cortical node implants from the Company to optimize worker productivity runs through Seed Beetle: poems by Mahaila Smith. For example, within “Reviled” on p. 38-39:

        I yell

	and the voice informs me
	of my raised heart rate and stress levels.
	Suggests I take a walk.

	I pace, apoplectic 

Even without the brain-bots, we’ve all been to the patronizing diagnosing sessions with others. Relatable through the ages. Individual poems delight down the phrase and made me laugh aloud often.

So far as strengths and relationship to previous work, I was lucky enough to hear Smith at a Factory Reading in Ottawa, and sat up straight and said who is this now? There’s the surreal influence of Stuart Ross but quite another vibrancy spectrum. Enter the Hyperreal by Mahaila Smith (above/ground, 2024) felt defined and distinct in a way first chapbooks and even books often aren’t. A sure, clear voice with ricochet angles of ideas and word choices that isn’t expected. This much links the chapbook with the debut collection. I look forward to what Smith can imagine next, of stories worth telling in a compelling manner.

Pearl Pirie lives quietly & slowly in rural Quebec and Ottawa. Her latest is “we astronauts” from Pinhole Poetry in 2025. Her most recent poetry book was Footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). www.pearlpirie.com