For the past two summers, I have lived at a relatively remote field station in Northwestern Ontario, which lends itself well to books I can read several times over. Flyway, by Sarah Ens, shares many of my preoccupations – prairie animals, family migration, settler relationships with stolen land – although from a different perspective than my own as Ens charts her family’s place in the Russian Mennonite diaspora and among migrating birds. On a line level, this book of poetry is full of sound and echoes and navigates incredibly well through different forms. Ens threads the poetry with questions that reverberate throughout the book, holding space for its many themes. Flyway also covers wide expanses of time and space quite deftly as it explores a multigenerational narrative arc while keeping the reader and poetry grounded. This is a recent release, but one I have already returned to, and one that becomes more vivid with each read.
Tazi Rodrigues is a writer and master’s student in biology who studies movement and fresh water in both disciplines. A second-generation settler from Winnipeg, she is currently based in Kingston, Ontario. Her lighthouse-island chapbook, I Followed the Coasts, was published by JackPine Press in 2021.
Read Tazi Rodrigues' creative nonfiction piece "Lunar Cycle in Drought" in Issue 294 (Winter 2023)
