sometimes, forest Front Cover


ISBN: 9781772017113
Pages: 87 pp
Pub. Date: April 14 2026
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.4375"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Poetry / POE023030

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sometimes, forest
By Elee Kraljii Gardiner

sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker yearns for in herself. But the coastal temperate rainforest continues foresting, existing independently of the speaker’s wants or needs, a place of both refuge and harm. Returning daily to the same woods, the speaker notices minute seasonal changes and considers her own internal changes too.

Meanwhile, fires, heat domes, and landslides mirror hormonal heat and biological surges. Considering how networks of lateral support mitigate and challenge hierarchical, individualistic structures, sometimes, forest develops a theory of hylofeminism that attends to a deep, communal connection with nature as a relational way of being with the self and the more-than-human world.

By Elee Kraljii Gardiner

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of two poetry books, Trauma Head (Anvil Press, 2018) and serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016). She is editor of the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living (Anvil Press, 2019) and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012) and nine anthologies from Thursdays Writing Collective, a program she founded with Downtown Eastside writers. She is also author of the chapbooks Trauma Head: the medical file (Otter Press, 2017) and Residence (Otter Press, 2023).

Originally from Boston, Elee lives in Vancouver, where she directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program pairing authors with mentors. She serves as the seventh Poet Laureate of Vancouver until the conclusion of 2028 and is focusing on sound-related projects.

Read more about Elee Kraljii Gardiner