Fast Commute: A Poem

by Laurie D. Graham

A powerful book-length poem on environmental destruction and the violences of colonial nation-states from the acclaimed author of Settler Education.




Here is a lament for places in flux, where industrial, commercial, or suburban development encroaches or invades. From Highway 401 to Refinery Row east of Edmonton, from Lake Ontario to the Fraser River, this long poem takes aim at the structures that support ecological injustice and attempts new forms of expression grounded in respect for flora, fauna, water, land, and air. It also wrestles with the impossibility of speaking ethically about "the environment" as a settler living within and benefiting from the will to destroy that so often doubles as nationalism.

Following physical routes and terrains, Fast Commute exists both within and outside the dissociative registers of colonialism and capitalism. This deeply engaging book offers a way to see, learn about, and live in relationship with other-than-human life, and to begin dealing with loss on a grand scale.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published March 22, 2022

About the author

Laurie D. Graham comes from Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta) and currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the treaty and traditional territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a poet, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her first book, Rove, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada, and her second book, Settler Education, was nominated for the Trillium Award for Poetry. A third book is forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart in 2022.

Reviews

[Monte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book landed very unexpectedly in my life without my looking for it—I very literally just happened to find it—and at the perfect time. I’m in the process of trying to make a home of an aggressively urban place, of trying to find what of the natural world is left in it and to connect to it as best I can, of trying to understand what home even means in a crumbling world. Fast Commute comforted and pushed me in all the right ways on this path.

[Salty Swift · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great night for a fine book length poem....this one focuses on environmental destruction and the ethics of what humans end up doing to our surroundings. Brutally honest work.

[D.A. Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastically paced and beautiful lyric this is a poetic experience akin to Gary Snyder's best work

[Penn Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of searing, imagistic vignettes that flash onto the inner eye like lightning bolts of realization, the clarity of Grahan’s moral vision. The space between each scene allows for a settling, though the context remains profoundly unsettling. “the mourning dove knows my species/better than I know its species/ and with this understanding to start to hear—” “The longing, the lively, the study.” “Crows in each treetop, parsing” “In the hills, aspiring.” “The sky on the way home told me something/its gold through clouds”.

This fragment, “As long as the pysanky are written,/ life will continue”, leads me to this poem, “Vermeer” by Wisława Szymborska:
“So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.”