The metaphor of ‘gaps’—things that are missing, things that are lost—is everywhere in the book, even in the form of the poems themselves. Why is this such a powerful idea for you?

I have many answers to this, but here is my answer for today. I have been living with this ‘thing’ my whole life where when people first meet me, they react to something I’m not seeing or even aware of at that moment—this gap, this space, this ‘flaw’.

And they often have wildly different reactions. It’s fascinating because little kids will often come up to me and start pointing at my gap, asking about it, because they haven’t yet been socialized out of noting people’s differences. It often comes as a relief because they’re so honest. They just want to talk to me about it, but then their mothers will come along to shush them, apologizing, embarrassed.

Men in particular often seem to hate acknowledging or talking about the gap. When I mention it, they sometimes get visibly uncomfortable, as if I am supposed to pretend it’s not there—I have actually seen them shudder—but, on the other hand, my romantic partners over the years have often found it the most erotic thing about me, and they have all kinds of suggestively Freudian reasons for this.

So, after a lifetime of these seemingly small, insignificant experiences I started thinking there had to be more meaning to the gap, that this tiny flaw in my body—that I once tried unsuccessfully to fix—is telling me something about our secret demands for conformity, about social and sexual repression, about our need for control. Yet living with a gap has also taught me that desire often comes from our fascination not with those like ourselves, but with the other, with all that is not us, and those features that are unique to the persons we love.

To me, this is a metaphor for art, especially the poetry I am trying to write. I know that my work might be challenging for some, even ugly to others, but I have to trust in the originality and strangeness of the (accented) voice I have been given and hope it comes vividly alive, even with gaps, on the page.

In what way do your poems explore the politics of gender and identity, and the notion of ‘belonging’ to a culture or a place?

To answer the second part first, I think the poems express a deep suspicion of belonging to a place, a concept that I held near and dear for years as I travelled around and pined for the island, but I realized pretty soon after I moved back home to have my son, that this pining was built mostly on nostalgia and grief.

Look, the deepest most subterranean parts of myself are constructed out of ocean and rock and wind and stunted bushes, tuckamore and bakeapples, rugged landscapes and the bitterness of Tetley tea, and I hope that always comes through in my poetry, but I am now more aware than ever how community and ‘connection to place’ can be used to exclude those who are perceived not to belong, for any reason whatsoever.

For example, and I think this is connected to your question on gender and identity, I don’t think my Nan ever felt she ‘belonged’ to the island even though I can think of no one who more embodied the place than her. But, you know, she was also her own unique self, and she liked to wear golden scarves and silver shoes and show some cleavage now and again, and I think she was rejected because of it. Before she died, she told me they used to call her a witch, make fun of her stutter. Later on, she was thought to be putting on airs.

This taboo on originality is part of ‘belonging’ to a place too, and I don’t think we talk about it enough in Canada, so I am exploring it here in my poetry—by honouring my Nan in all her unusual glory.

The other part of this is what we don’t know about the place or the people to whom we claim to belong. In a settler colonial society like Canada, what right does anyone, except indigenous peoples, have to claim belonging? History is very mysterious in Canada, perhaps especially on the island. There is a lot we have not been told. The books we were asked to study at school have been telling us lies, glossing over things, hoping the culture will forget the truth about how Canada came to be.

And this is the other great gap, the greatest gap of all, if you will, that I have tried to acknowledge in my own way in the book, not out of guilt, no, but out of a deep poetic need for a better sense of history, my own history, however treacherous the waters, or the very ground, might become.