Coach House Books Nebulas Broché

Poems that look at our little world from space

In Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee positions these giant clouds of glowing space dust, often the ‘nursery’ where new stars and planets are born, in an interconnected web of lyric form. As dazzling masses of matter and energy, fleeting, exploding and collapsing, creating connection across incomprehensible distances, these poems use constellations and light-years to reconfigure how art, mortality, loss, death, and afterlives are miraculous echoes and patterns in a gorgeous, chaotic universe.

Included in this dazzling collection are an extraterrestrial fox who works at a gas station, meditations about living across from a hospital during the Omicron surge, weathering climate disasters in North Vancouver, strange deep-sea ecosystems, conversations with a space-god who may be Walt Whitman, and multiple retellings of a Zen koan about tigers and strawberries. Here, respiration and repetition – literally, verse – acts as an outstanding formal feature, a way of creating connections and shared breath across spacetime.