Wellwater: Poems

by Karen Solie

The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solie’s sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural, economic, and personal ideas of “value,” addressing housing, economic and environmental crisis, and aging and its incumbent losses. In an era of accelerating inequality, places many of us thought of as home have become unaffordable. In “Basement Suite,” the faux-utopian economy of Airbnb suggests people with property “share” it with us and, presumably, we should be grateful. In “Parables of the Rat” the speaker feels affinity with scavengers while also wanting the rats gone.


Having grown up in Saskatchewan on a small family farm, Solie sees the economic and environmental crises as inseparable. Climate change has made small farming increasingly untenable, allowing overbearing corporate control of food production. But hope, Solie argues, is as necessary to addressing the crises of our time as bearing witness, in poems that celebrate wonder and persistence in the non-human world. Tamarack forests in Newfoundland that grow inches over hundreds of years, the suddenly thriving pronghorn antelope, or a new, unidentified and ineradicable climbing vine, all hint at renewal, and a way to move forward.

Genres: Poetry, Canada, Nonfiction, Nature

112 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2025

About the author

Prize-winning and internationally celebrated poet Karen Solie grew up on her family's farm in rural Saskatchewan. She was educated at the University of Lethbridge and the University of Victoria. She has taught English at the University of Victoria and poetry at the Banff Centre for the Arts Writing Studio. Solie has also served as writer-in-residence at universities and arts centres across the country, including the University of Alberta and the University of New Brunswick. Karen Solie is one of Canada's leading contemporary lyric poets.

Reviews

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fellow transplant from the Canadian Prairies to Toronto, I connected deeply with these poems. This collection contains beautiful poetry about nature, poems with a stirring environmental message, and poetry about the realities of day-to-day life in Toronto (like the experience of being told to smile by a stranger and sworn at when you ignore him). Reading these made me feel more deeply connected to the province I hail from as well as the wonderful, imperfect city I now call home.

[A Dreaming Bibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an eARC.

This was a beautifully written poetry collection that really made me stop, look back and think about what's going on in the world and how it is slowly (or rapidly these days) being destroyed from the inside. The environment crisis was put into such simple but sharp words and phrases that it cannot be missed and must serve as a wakeup call to everyone. My favorite poems were The Grasslands, Parable of the Rats, Basement Suite and Berkeley Hills, 2022. Some of my favourite lines include: "....for what good to us is a place left on its own?" and "Rat, unlike you I'm ashamed of what I do, which is nothing." Some of the shorter poems ended before I could appreciate it enough but I enjoyed most of the poems in this book. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for eco-poetry.

[Clover · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5
Beautiful, modern, and full of anxiety, stress, fear, and grief over the changing world.

Out of the 42 poems, I only liked 18 of them. I found myself questioning some of them after I finished, I just couldn't get what I had just read. Many I found ended too short, even ones I liked, as if they never got finished.

Here are the ones I enjoyed:
The Trees in Riverside Park
"The trees are grand hotels closed for the season.
But below ground, social life is taking place."
8 That Which Was Learned in Youth Is Always Most Familiar
A beautiful poem about a child's wisdom

Red Spring
A poem about crops, chemicals, and outcomes. Akin to Percy Schmeiser v. Monsanto.
"{. . .} the earliest stage at which herbicides

may be applied — Luxxur™ for problematic grass weeds —
as white-railed fawns sleep inside wild chokecherry"

Autumn Day
Stark realities of trying to buy a home.

Toronto the Good
Returning to a place you used to live and seeing how unlivable it is now.

On Faith
"There was no reason
not to believe
the overgrown wells
in abandoned yards

still held water
that, like all things forgotten,
was ruined and dangerous."

Parables of the Rat
"And maybe a soul is a satellite,
a small idea orbiting a larger one, a device
to translate a signal
and send it back.

The rat is still a rat.
There is no getting around what we are."

Next Life
"[. . .]the spirit of her belongings, any remnants of utility and charm,

had chosen to accompany her into the next life. The world
used her right up, along with the little she'd been given.
But everything she'd been given she found a use for."

The Snowplow
"[. . .] The plow is a child of the north,
like Romanticism. And what a dad-rock moment

here on the sidewalk, watching the blade
at it's superb angle push everything before it"

The Grasslands
All that is Canada's grasslands; the good and bad; past and present. All of it: beautiful.
"until settlement — as settlement does,
without consultation, in violence and paperwork —
by the Dominion Lands Act of 1872"

Antelope
I don't even know, but the imagery was great.

Smoke
About the wildfires.
"though what arises is not clarity
but a set of new misgivings. Is this how the world will be
and not just how it is?"

Berkeley Hills, 2022
The personification of laurels was wonderful.
"Like girls do, the laurels grow
from the soil of a deep reserve."

Anne Dufourmantelle
" [. . .] names
are the nearest we can get
to truth."

The Barrens
I don't even know, it was just cute and I liked imagining the rabbits losing their keys in alleyways.

Prime Location
"it inhales the amnesia
of spores, light filters through
its soaped windows like light
through the soaped windows

of all the deconsecrated churches
awaiting resurrection as condos"

Orion
"Smoking in the yard two weeks before Christmas
out of the wind, under Orion,
inhaling anger, exhaling sorrow,
which is how anger metabolizes,
the end product always a sorrow
of remorse or failure. I would give this anger
to Orion, whom I've only recently learned to identify"

[Jessi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The past is so poorly constructed, so unsuited to the living
that must must be done, we might wish for the forest to grow up around it—

but knowledge can't replace the facts
of its acquisition. They continue to perform

in the events they set in motion
whether we remember them or not.

— "The Bluebird"

[Meghan Molnar · Rating 5 out of 5]

a deep love for these poems which have allotted me so much insight and grace both about how to write poems and how to live

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was looking for a new poetry book to read and after learning that this author grew up in Saskatchewan I knew I wanted to read this book! I loved Wellwater by Karen Solie! These poems contain great action and I loved the mentions of Canada. My fave poems are That Which Was Learned in Youth Is Always Most Familiar and Toronto the Good. I also loved this line in Flashlight: “for Pete’s sake, death is not Saskatchewan”. I’d love to read this author’s backlist now too!

Thank you to FSG Books via NetGalley for my ARC!

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

4-4.5. This collection is very much of its time: the poems center on the environmental and economic crisis, while pinballing between Canadian suburbia and cityscape, past and present, renewal and decay. Solie dissects present-day issues, wielding the pen like a scalpel (each word feels exact). In the first poem and throughout the book there’s a lot about Canada’s housing crisis too (run-down rentals, steep prices, etc.), which I found really interesting. But it’s not all bleak: the last poem, “Canopy”, about baby owls, ends on a kind of hopeful note.

[Dr. Devine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection. Witty and thoughtful observations on all sorts of topics ranging from introspection to Airbnb's.

Really loved "Grasslands" but the whole collection is outstanding. Canadian poetry rarely misses.

[Chanel Chapters]

The prairie remembers what you sprayed on it

Arc from NetGalley

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...it's beautiful, when sleeping populations open their eyes/and nitrogen is fixed inside the earth."

Woven around competing perspectives on land, home, and property, WELLWATER's free-verse explorations of environmental themes both beautiful and disquieting remind me at turns of John Kinsella's poems. Solie's style of verse, meditative and loosely structured, means that the poems sometimes blurred into each other when I read them, though a few stood out for their particular beauty: I loved the epiphanic conclusion of "That which was learned in youth...", the economical storytelling of "Smoke" (this may have been what prompted the comparison to Kinsella, whose "Bushfire Approaching" also responds to a wildfire), and the direct but effective satire of "Prime Location".

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Running through Wellwater are the places that Solie has lived: basement suites, new-build condos, the memories of family that still trouble or sustain her, and the appreciation of plantlife, the flora that so permeates her work that she uses the word "inflorescence" not once but twice across this collection. I think that may exceed her allotment, but that's fine. Solie's fascination with the properties of plants and of language, and her tendency towards the vatic, make up the three pillars of at least my interest in her work. And I'm biased of course, because I too, like her, come from Saskatchewan and have passed time in these other Canadian cities where the memory of the prairie grasses never disappears. My sole note of dissatisfaction comes from the sometimes overly minimal nature of the poems, how they sustain only a half-note of feeling before vanishing.

There are many scattered zingers. "Money buys the knowledge it isn't everything", she writes in "Autumn Day", which is about the financial reckoning that buying a home is beyond reach. "You need to understand damage / in order to communicate it simply", she writes sparingly in "Pines", ostensibly about water damage to a floor but intimating the broad architecture of structures and feelings in which damage is how people are linked. Always in the background here is the tragic sense of knowledge, the failing or failed relationship, the sorrow of loss and hurt. While Solie is visibly conscious of and writes about the failings of society - "the muffins of a culture on the brink / of steep decline" she writes in "Autumn Day", and she returns multiple times to the sufferings of renters and the degradation of societal relations - at heart, she cleaves close to the personal, to her heart, and here is where she best succeeds.

To me, "Yarrow" stands out as a favourite.

The thousand leaves of an old knowlege,
umbels of its inflorescence, conquer the road-edge

and riverbank, it's one of the indecencies of age
that landscape takes on this commemorative aspect.

Achillea millefolium --
though it was Patroclus who used the fernlike analgesic leaves,

hemostatic also and delicately furred,
to treat the wounds of fallen soldiers. With knowledge comes

that duty. Pain, mostly, and the relief from pain.
Duty performed willingly feels like kindness

to its recipients, kindness withheld like cruelty.
Patroclus, well-loved, but a person will follow his nature.

Some answers are so simple they can be awful to look at,
so obvious as to inspire anger, like a monochrome painting

that refuses the existence of any secrets
it might hide from us, that we could fight about

or pretend to ignore. There is no starting over,
never has been. And like an adage the yarrow deteriorates

quickly, yellows, smells like the back end of a festival,
all that wasted potential, while upstream

at Cahill Fabrication, an industry we can all get behind,
another simile detaches from the narrative,

searches for crisis in the action
but finds things resemble most clearly what they are,

if made a little easier to swallow. In pill and tea form
yarrow is prized, yet disapproved of in its natural state

for how it proliferates in a time
when scarcity is a strategy. I would have liked

to offer my kindness as freely to you, when it mattered,
would have liked to think I had it in me.

One cannot improve on this.

[Karen Ocana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wellwater is remarkable. I can't put it down. Perhaps I should let it speak for itself.

The Grasslands is perhaps the longest poem in Karen Solie's sixth collection of poems. Even after a couple of weeks of reading Wellwater, this is the poem I keep coming back to. The one full of rolling seas of grasses, splendid in their variety:

" the silvery, slender, rough,
needle-leafed, wavy-leafed, cut-leaf, thyme-leafed,
wild, false, tufted, and procumbent,
fringed and nodding, the long-bracted, shaggy,
pleated, brittle, the creeping and smooth,[...]"

Home to irritable bison and also to black-footed ferrets, the poem asks "is this beauty, all this grass?"

The second question hits even harder:

"The best thing for it may be that we are not there --
But what good is a place left on its own?

Oil and gas companies say, not much.
Grass-covered hill after grass-covered hill
keeping its concerns to itself, and the Frenchman River

hardly a river,

meandering its tilted valley, muttering about irrigation,
swinging its head side to side like a working horse."

There is a third question to tease us into thinking. It comes after the poem's answer to its first rhetorical question about what use is a place (or a species; in this case the black-footed ferrets) left on its own:

"They belong to themselves as you belong to yourself,
more difficult to restore than to destroy

And what good are you
left on your own?

Unmet at the meeting point, obsessed with endings,
all the nothing really adding up?"

Wellwater offers 42 titles.

One poem follows another like grassy hill after grassy hill... (I do love this image from The Grasslands.) You don't have to read them in sequence, of course. You can begin anywhere.

Poems vary in length, subject, tone, style, place, and time. What binds them unmistakably is the poet's quiet questing voice.

I've read Caribou many times, yet it continues to surprise me.

Wellwater is the title poem. I've read it often. We'll discuss it tomorrow with my poetry group. I could have chosen almost any of the poems in this collection and had / have a great discussion.

Well water is something that's almost disappeared from our world. Or has it? There's a video from my childhood, where I'm walking with my uncle and cousin and we're carrying buckets. We walk through long grass and finally end up standing with some people around a well. Yes, and then the bucket is let down into the depths of this well, and up it comes again full of water. It's maybe 1967, in Ontario, on a farm somewhere between Toronto and Georgian Bay.

Wellwater visits parks, surveys city streets, smokes in parking lots. It examines the effects of fog, wonders at the word 'starlit' when stars emit so little light. It offers stories about yarrow, dwelling with the plant, offering absorbing detail. It delights, even in suburban malls. Attention and memory. The two are intertwined like algae and fungus, bringing us poetic lichen.

The burrowing owl and its owlets, the sage grouse, the caribou and the prong-horned antelope, the vole, the thrush, these are some of the characters whose curious intertwining lives matter to the narrator of Wellwater.

They matter as much as the lives of family members, neighbours, colleagues, corporations, friend or foe... a smattering of whom dot the pages of Wellwater.

Matter as much as the cottonwoods with their singing canopy and the tuckamore with its muddy basement suites.

[Olivia-Savannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a thoughtful, well written poetry collection with a strong message.

I don't usually read nature poetry. You can miss me with that Walt Whitman. But I can see why this is winning all the poetry prizes, and it would be perhaps deriviative to simply label this as 'nature poetry.'

This is poetry for the current generation. It's about the ways in which the urban meets nature. How we disrupt it. It's about climate change, and seeing nature as nothing more than a retreat and sanctuary, instead of as its own independent entity that coexists with us whether we are in the city or not.

There's also a sense of persona interacting with the nature in these poems, which is what I think a lot of classic nature poetry is missing. A sense of emotional interaction and reaction to the mentions of nature, which makes it more relatable to us as readers. As we have had similar encounters ourselves.

That's not to mention the language, clever use of metaphor, and other literary devices as well. On a line level, this is beautiful.

[Kym · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn’t yet been introduced to the work of Canadian poet Karen Solie, so I was especially pleased to receive an advance copy of Wellwater, Solie’s newest poetry collection, due to be published in the US in early May 2026.

Karen Solie writes powerful, lyrical poems about environmental, cultural, and economic issues and how they influence . . . where we live, how we live. Not to be read quickly, her collection is meaty and requires a level of immersion and attention for full impact. I was especially taken with The Grasslands. In fact, I will look forward to purchasing my own copy of this collection when it comes out in May just to have that particular poem in my personal library.

Thank you to Farrar, Strauss and Giraux and to NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The collection will be published May 5, 2026.

4.5 stars, rounded to 5

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Karen Solie has long been one of my favorite poets in this collection, which won the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, she reaches back into childhood for memories and moments. Many of these are almost elegiac, reminiscences of lost times and lost spaces. As always, there are some wonderful lines and phrases that freeze your breath with their beauty.

She has escaped
through the window of the body’s
house of harm
into the freedom of a truth that will
never be recognized.

From Caribou

I wish I was a close reader. I am not. But I enjoy poetry for its atmosphere, and the ability to capture ineffable, almost transcendent moments. And the collection manifests those qualities, in spades.

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for the opportunity to read this. I have been trying to expand my reading with more poetry and was drawn by the title of this book. Wellwater has an entire set of memories for me so I was curious. There are some beautiful images within the works. But I struggled a bit to find a hook to what I was reading and feelings about them. I am certain this is me and my newness to reading the genre. I did enjoy the angst and struggle present in the pieces and feel it very relevant to today’s world.

[Freya Abbas · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are innovative poems when it comes to form and syntax. They can be read out loud because they sound good. They look good on the page because the poet has thought about the form. I also thought they were highly relevant and speak of economic and environmental issues, subjects that could make Karen Solie part of a Canadian canon of poets.

[Nathalie Kati · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poems I enjoyed:

8 - That Which Was Learned in Youth is Always Most Familiar*
31 - Next Life *
37 - The Bluebird *
39 - Just Say The Word
41 - The Snowplow
43 - No One’s Gonna Love You More Than I Do
47 - The Climbing Vine
49 - The Mash *
52 - Yarrow
56 - Flashlight
58 - Horseshoe *
60 - Delisle
63 - The Grasslands
73 - Ann Dufourmantelle
75 - Mirrors *
82 - Prime Location

[Barbara Sibbald]

A magnificent collection... I can see why it won the GG. I was especially drawn to the pieces about our description of the planet ("Red Spring" & "Smoke" among them), but equally I adored her quiet poems about nature ("Foxes" & "The trees in Riverdale Park").
I will no doubt be reading this again.

[Rhea Tregebov · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional book by a highly talented writer. I've long admired Solie, but I think this is her best book yet. "That Which Was Learned in Youth is Almost Most Familiar" is a favourite; utterly charming and also profound. What a lovely read.

[Fátima Chib · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux fro sending me this book!
The poems in this collection are so clever, written in such a brilliant way that takes your breath away at the same time as hitting deeply into your core and soul, such a magnificent expirience!

[Elaine]

Didn't connect with every poem, but she has incredible syntactic elegance, and turns to abstraction at the ends of poems that somehow never feel trite.

Favourites -
Parables of the Rat
Next Life
Yarrow
Anne Dufourmantelle
Pines

[Emma Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

truly cannot believe this is my advisor. she is a genius

[Cooch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four and a half stars

For me, this collection started slowly and got better and better. I feel it will improve too on further reading.

[Ava Ugolini · Rating 5 out of 5]

So hard to read her bibliography backwards when this is what you’re starting with. So hard to read any other poet, too, and not crave Wellwater

[Goodreeds User · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crystal clear and crystal sharp and crystal many-sided. Really really really good