undercurrent

by Rita Wong

The water belongs to itself. undercurrent reflects on the power and sacredness of water--largely underappreciated by too many--whether it be in the form of ocean currents, the headwaters of the Fraser River or fluids in the womb. Exploring a variety of poetic forms, anecdote, allusion and visual elements, this collection reminds humanity that we are water bodies, and we need and deserve better ways of honouring this.

Poet Rita Wong approaches water through personal, cultural and political lenses. She humbles herself to water both physically and "i will apprentice myself to creeks & tributaries, groundwater & glaciers / listen for the salty pulse within, the blood that recognizes marine ancestry." She witnesses the contamination of First Nations homelands and sites, such as Gregoire Lake near Fort McMurray, "though you look placid, peaceful dibenzothiophenes / you hold bitter, bitumized depths." Wong points out that though capitalism and industry are supposed to improve our quality of life, they're destroying the very things that give us life in the first place. Listening to and learning from water is key to a future of peace and creative potential.

undercurrent emerges from the Downstream project, a multifaceted, creative collaboration that highlights the importance of art in understanding and addressing the cultural and political issues related to water. The project encourages public imagination to respect and value water, ecology and sustainability. Visit downstream.ecuad.ca.

Genres: Poetry, Canada, Grad School

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2015

About the author

Rita Wong is the author of four books of poetry: monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998), forage (Nightwood Editions, 2007), sybil unrest (Line Books, 2008, with Larissa Lai) and undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015). forage was the winner of the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Canada Reads Poetry 2011.

Wong is an associate professor in the Critical and Cultural Studies department at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design on the unceded Coast Salish territories also known as Vancouver.

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a really solid collection of poetry. Very rich in language and culture, and it’s ecopolitical themes were explored thoroughly. Highly recommend!

[Sam Sawazki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for class and found it absolutely beautiful. It echoes a lot of sentiments I share but in Wong's beautiful prose. It saddens me that she wrote this 6 years ago and yet little has changed around how we treat our precious ecosystems. I hope one day her vision for the future is attained. The alternative is too sad to consider.

[Alexis]

Read for Asian Women's book club. Looking forward to the discussion.

[Ezra · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was my first encounter with Rita Wong’s poetry. I wish now that I hadn’t read an entire volume of it, for while Wong occasionally writes a poem that I can emotionally connect to, too much of the book was filled with the same message. There’s something to be said for conveying a message without telling everyone that you have a message. Nearly all of the poems here seem to have the same heavy-handedness on the same topic.
Wong’s poetry in undercurrent is made of disjointed metaphors and lines of thought. Reading this poetry about the abuse of Earth and it’s water is like reading my own thoughts, which are not easily collected, and which overwhelm and distract me if I do not approach them somewhat cautiously and systematically.
That style is all well and good, but I want an activist poet to be more cogent in the wordcraft than my raw thoughts.

[Ciarra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for class and I really liked it. It got me really interested in environmental issues.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was beautifully written and comments on a dire situation that must be talked about more frequently. However, I found that the poems began to get very repetitive nearing the end of the book.

[Ayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful

[Niki Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

REMEMBERING THE FUTURE

[feux d'artifice · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this collection I'm excited by all the possibilities ecopoetics has to offer 😄

[Greg · Rating 1 out of 5]

See my review for 'Forage'. 'undercurrent' harbours a few profound statements by virtue of its universal topic, water, but it is written with a dull pencil.

[Daniel Barlekamp · Rating 2 out of 5]

I agree with Rita Wong's ideas about water conservation, climate justice, and environmental activism in this book. The poetry just didn't resonate with me on an emotional level.

[amyleigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was beautiful and relentless in its tug toward action. Wong's multivocal poetics brings together the voices of water with workers with sea creatures with chemicals with citizens to urgently ask where we go from here.

[Jay · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thomas C. Foster wrote, "Any creative-writing teacher can tell you that student fiction (bad) comes in two basic styles, the all-action-all-the-time shoot-em-up-blow-em-up and the deadly earnest message piece that is deadly dull." Rita Wong's undercurrent is trying to0 hard to send an environmental message.

It was dull, and I couldn't reach pg 30 before I felt like I was being beat over the head with the message that she was trying to instill throughout this work. Her cause is good, it is justified. Her writing suffered. There was not a single creative cell in my body that reacted to the way her poems were strung together. I wanted the experience of Anne Carson, of Roo Borson, of Don McKay (excellent nature poet); I wanted something that spoke to me on a creative level. I didn't want to be lectured.

[Drew Canole · Rating 1 out of 5]

I enjoyed the author's text pieces on her workings with various aboriginal groups and environmental advocates. I thought it was very enlightening as to the challenges they face when competing against big business and global political interests (in the case of oil and pollution).

The poetry, which makes up the main portion of the book, didn't interest me. I'm sure others will enjoy it, but to me they seemed a little too slight.

There were a couple poems that really turned me off where it just seemed like a list of words (all related to the environment).

Mark as: not for me, but I'm sure others will like it.

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm hesitant to be harsh because this collection had good intentions, and I 100% agree with the sentiments of the poetry's content. But it's executed in an uninteresting, very typical contemporary way. The various forms add nothing of interest to the content of the poetry and it's more distracting than anything. I didn't connect with any of the poems, which is the standard that I hold poetry to. Just very average overall. Again, I feel a bit mean being so harsh in this review because I can see what the poetry was trying to be, it just wasn't effective for me.

[Asa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic side-eye at settler capitalism that makes you feel both morally awake and vaguely doomed. It’s the sound of water watching pipelines and saying, “I told you so.”