Nebulas - by Meghan Kemp-Gee (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Throughout the centuries, poetry's sublime subject has been nature. But not like this! Meghan Kemp-Gee's third book, Nebulas, cements her unique position as a talented, original, multi-faceted mind using nature and science to understand human nature. It's dazzling. Every poem is unexpected. She's always burned with a biological curiosity; in Nebulas she adds an astonishingly wide astronomical lens, tied always to home. Tennyson predicted poets would one day 'walk hand in hand with the man of science' a century and a half later, Kemp-Gee pulls C.P. Snow's Two Cultures together into that rich and necessary whole. This poet gives us so much to think about, at a crucial time. We soar with her remarkable imagination. You won't get it, and then you will. Beautiful!" - Dr. Tara Cullis, President, The David Suzuki Foundation.

"Come follow Meghan Kemp-Gee on her kinetic tour from the forgotten edges of the universe into the soft heart of suburban Vancouver. Filled with startlingly vivid imagery, each poem is an electric meditation, whether pondering the Fishhead Nebula calling its Mom back, the gas station at the edge of town, Lions Gate Hospital across the street, or the sea creatures of Deep Cove. Starring an Atlantic giant pumpkin, constellations, strawberries, and Vancouver's SkyTrain and SeaBus, Nebulas is a study in how to whimsically render the ordinary. Populated with pipelines, climate change, ER wait times, long-haulers, and climbing gas prices, this haunting collection also grounds us in the new uncertainties of the 21 st century. For everyone who is "barely holding on," let Nebulas guide you, if you also "want to scream and scream." - Catherine Lewis, author of Zipless

"It is abundantly clear that Kemp-Gee, like the speaker of Walt Whitman's "When I heard the learn'd astronomer," has "look'd up in perfect silence at the stars." An impressively evocative collection of sparkling poems, interconnected by mythical and mundane motifs and catalogs of closely-examined minutiae, is the result." - Allison M. Johnson, editor of The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans

"In her latest book Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee has shaped gorgeous words for the many "not-nothings" across lightyears of our universe. With the stars as her guide and a firm sense of home, these lustrous poems are love songs and longings and leaps of a marvelous imagination. Meghan Kemp-Gee's Nebulas is a lush collection of star gazings, from Dolly Parton and Yo-Yo Ma to the Big Dipper and the Witch Head Nebula. And yet, these profound poems also make sense of the hospital across the street and the swimming cove a few miles way. Reading Nebulas, I'm in awe. Every poem holds me in two places at once. Nebulas beautifully blends science and daily life into poems that contain multitudes, that magnify and amplify the points where the human-made and natural worlds overlap and spin. Here, Meghan Kemp-Gee peers through both microscope and telescope to find right-handed molecules and stars wearing pigeon feathers. She deftly invites us into her singular way of seeing near and far to discover the vast and fascinating somethings in between. " - Anna Leahy, author of If in Some Cataclysm

Praise for the author:

'Kemp-Gee is a gifted satirist, whose wandering and wondering eye makes The Animal in the Room a fully unique book.' - Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

'In The Animal in the Room, Meghan Kemp-Gee develops a poetics of the Anthropocene. . . this collection of poetry can be seen as a compendium of reflections on the age of human impact' - Jane Frankish, The British Columbia Review

'From wolves handing out resumés, to quiet observations on the feeding habits of deer ticks, throughout the collection we witness not only Kemp-Gee's insightful use of animals as a way to explore human behaviour, but also the way our gaze towards animals can be turned inward.' - David Ly, Plenitude Magazine, on The Animal in the Room

'Throughout The Animal in the Room, there are poems that sparkle with inventiveness and wit, as she composes a bestiary of sentences and syntax.' - Rob McLennan, Dusie

'Meghan Kemp-Gee's writing is hypnotizing in its undoing of the boundaries of what it means to be a person, redefining emotions that are supposedly distinctly human.' - Collin Lu, Broken Pencil Magazine, on The Animal in the Room

About the Author

Meghan Kemp-Gee is an award-winning poet, teacher, and scriptwriter. She is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023), as well as four poetry chapbooks. She co-created the graphic novel One More Year, and co-edited the sports-comics anthology Come Out and Play. She holds degrees from Amherst College and Chapman University, and is now a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick, where her dissertation focuses on sports literature. She currently lives in North Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.