reviewed by rob maclennan
Further to the first season of the relaunched Gaspereau Press comes Whitehorse, Yukon poet and editor Jamella Hagen’s full-length second poetry collection, Perfect Weather (Sackville NB: Gaspereau Press, 2026), an assemblage of clear-eyed, precise, first-person lyric narratives. “That day in Naramata,” the opening poem, the title poem, begins, “we watched the fires start.” In the shadow of wildfires, Hagen uses her opening poem to add her voice to a growing storm of lyric voices, specifically western Canadian ones, responding to climate crisis and climate disaster, specifically around wildfires, including titles by Vancouver poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s sometimes, forest (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026), Kelowna poet Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024) and Delta poet Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024). As opening salvo, the two-page poem documents, investigates and articulates across an intimate lyric, but seeks response, or even clarification. “There was no real sign yet of trouble,” she continues, a few lines further, “an overripe / cherry hit the window like a starling, // summer air settled over us like an electric / blanket on high, sweat sprung in agile little bubbles // from our skin.” Perfect Weather begins with fires but opens into the broader landscape of her particular environment, both geographic and personal, writing (almost wistfully, at times) of foxes, science, family picnics, astronomy, memory, her mother’s stories, a substitute math teacher, and the Vancouver Olympics. “It takes me back.” she writes, referencing a recollection of the Men’s Hockey final between Canada and the United States, in her poem “Ode to the Vancouver Olympics,” a game held on February 28, 2010 in Vancouver. As the poem closes:
In Skagway the little car sits quiet,
we press against the window of a shuttered
pub until the Alaskans behind the bar
slip back the lock, Oh you’re Canadian,
of course, come in. The Americans
want to win this, they say,
but the Canadians need to win.
It’s just a game, we tell ourselves,
and looking back, Vancouver too,
a bit of a sports match in its own right—
so much beauty and theatrics. But in this
moment, broken down and 175 km from home,
score tired up, we hold our breath, toss back
our pints of spruce tip beer, and take the win.
Structured in four untitled, numbered cluster-sections of lyrics, Hagen’s poems are careful, detailed and precise, outlining layers of chaos, restraint and calm, attempting to find her own clarification and safety, through lines packed with information. “I was chopping celery,” the poem “When My Mother Calls, She Tells Me Stories” opens, innocently enough, “my mother / across the table mending tiny gloves. / I was in a bad relationship, looking for a way / out. She said, I was seven months pregnant / with your brother. His father / had just fled the province, but I refused / to go with him. Then the cow escaped— [.]” The sharpness of her poems remain intact through Hagen knowing what to leave jagged, and what she should smooth, all composed with an ease of storytelling, and not a single wasted word. “When the poet leaves home / she sits on the floor of her rented room / all day,” she writes, as part of “Small Change,” “reading Prufrock. // The wind picks up; / with each gust the house hitches / beneath her like a horse.”
As part of the “Acknowledgments” at the back of the collection, Hagen offers that: “To me, this book is largely about getting oneself out of an unhealthy relationship and into healthier ones, which can be a very difficult thing to do and benefits so much from the support of others.” Hagen’s poems navigate layers, levels, of upheaval, attempting to reconcile, as Clea Roberts offers, as part of her back cover blurb, “this complexity of personhood,” one where anything might happen, and it often does. Or, as the poem “On Reflection,” near the end of the collection, closes:
I wish you, friends,
confidants, strangers,
all the quiet moments
you desire in this world.
Steal them if you have to.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), the book-length essay A river runs through it: a writing diary
, collaborating with Julie Carr (Spuyten Duyvil, 2026), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
The Woodlot 