Long Exposure

In her seventh poetry collection, award-winning Canadian poet Stephanie Bolster writes through disaster and tragedy in a book-length poem. Arranged like gallery walls, a curation of landscapes marked by flood, nuclear disaster, and human absence, Long Exposure made me contemplate the poet's role in arriving after catastrophe, not as a first-hand witness, but as one who must reckon with the ethics of representing another's suffering through language.

Bolster navigates a haunting parallel series of long-exposure photographs depicting two landscapes of ruin. First are Robert Polidori's After the Flood, which documents New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic levee failures of 2005. Second, Bolster turns to Polidori's Zones of Exclusion, particularly his photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat, where abandoned cities become enduring monuments to environmental catastrophe and human consequence.

Photographer Robert Polidori travelled to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, producing a series of large-format photographs that document the city's abandoned homes, waterlogged interiors, and shattered civic spaces. Rather than focusing on the storm itself, his lens lingers on what remained after the floodwaters receded. Mould creeping across wallpaper, overturned furniture, family possessions suspended in decay, and entire neighbourhoods emptied of human presence. These haunting images record not only physical destruction but the lingering traces of lives abruptly interrupted. It is within this landscape of absence and aftermath that Stephanie Bolster's Long Exposure begins, using Polidori's photographs as an entry point into a wider meditation on environmental catastrophe and ethical witnessing.

Bolster locates tension between herself and the art depicted of human tragedy. It is interesting to emphasize her first encounter with Polidori’s collection. “She’d got a Google alert of this Polidori photograph up for auction. And remarked, though she’s not going to bid, how “the language used to describe the painting is problematic in ways I want to write about.”” Bolster’s encounter with Polidori’s works was not of artful admiration, but tension.   

Published by Palimpsest Press, Long Exposure took Stephanie Bolster over the course of ten years to write. As a long poem, the work feels as a singular continuation of a thread of thought versus a collection of separate poems. She brings us into these terrible worlds with the captivity to survey atrocity through her lens. 

“As though rooms knew what would become of them,/ as though they were skins or had skins or eyes or felt/ anything, and a dog wandered through and howled and the walls/ responded and I was the dog, the thing that trespassed.” 

As readers, we trespass too. 

Bolster outlines in the Acknowledgements, “what began in 2009 as an interrogation of my unsettling fascination with Robert Polidori’s photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans became an education that has lasted for 16 years and does not end here.”

Long Exposure gathers its language from the fractured textures of contemporary life: news broadcasts, corporate emails, YouTube videos, rock lyrics, and Wikipedia entries. Rather than treating these disparate voices as distractions, Bolster embraces them as the very fabric of modern consciousness. As she explains, "we are increasingly digressive and distracted thinkers and readers," making the incorporation of these fragments essential to the work's final form.

While the collection revisits themes that have long occupied Bolster's writing, Long Exposure is her most formally adventurous book to date. She began the project knowing she "didn't know how to make the thing" she envisioned, allowing the poems to emerge through fragments and layered compositions. The collection was written in the margins of early motherhood, begun after the birth of her second daughter and composed in fleeting moments while the baby slept. Each return to the manuscript meant beginning again, gradually accumulating more than 1,200 pages before distilling them into the finished work.

Stephanie Bolster is the award-winning author of five poetry collections, most recently Long Exposure (Palimpsest Press, 2025), a meditation on photography, memory, environmental catastrophe, and the lingering aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Her debut collection, White Stone: The Alice Poems (1998), received both the Governor General's Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her subsequent collections, including Two Bowls of Milk, Pavilion, and A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, have earned the Archibald Lampman Award, been shortlisted for the Trillium and Pat Lowther Awards, and established her as one of Canada's foremost contemporary poets.

Known for her richly textured lyricism and ambitious book-length projects, Bolster's poetry has evolved from finely wrought individual lyrics to expansive sequences that weave history, image, and narrative into layered meditations on memory, loss, and human resilience. Born in Vancouver and raised in Burnaby, British Columbia, she lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec, on the Mohawk (Kanien'kehá) territory of Skaniatará, and has taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal since 2000.

Years before Long Exposure arrived, my introduction to Stephanie Bolster's poetry came through Two Bowls of Milk (1999) and Pavilion (2002), books that quietly embedded themselves into my own understanding of what a poem could hold. I encountered them not simply as collections of lyric poetry, but as meditations on perception itself, where the ordinary object became a threshold and the domestic interior expanded into an archaeology of memory. 

Bolster's poems resist spectacle. Instead, they cultivate a careful attentiveness, inviting readers to linger over windows, bowls, paintings, birds, and rooms until these familiar objects reveal hidden architectures of time. Reading them as a young writer, I recognized a poetics that trusted silence as much as declaration, where meaning seeped slowly through image rather than arriving fully articulated. Long before I would review Long Exposure, these earlier collections had already become part of my own appreciation of Canadian literature. 

One poem in particular, "Domesticity," remained with me long after I finished the collection. Beginning with the deceptively simple observation that "Windows arrange the world into views," the poem transforms the Dutch interior into a chamber where history, mortality and memory coexist within the geometry of light. The Dutch light, a muse in itself for 17th century Dutch painters and something that was lost with the introduction of electricity and artificial light. Bolster culls up this nostalgia and wonder of Dutch light.

Anne Frank appears only momentarily, folded into the landscape through a glimpse of elms beyond curtains, yet her presence alters the emotional atmosphere of the poem too. Domestic space becomes haunted by absence. A woman studies the shifting continents of light upon her arm while, behind the draped bed, someone quietly dies. Even the footwarmer, overlooked by adolescents in an Amsterdam museum, becomes an emblem of historical estrangement, a domestic artifact severed from the lived world that once animated it. Bolster's gift lies in revealing that history rarely announces itself dramatically, instead, it accumulates within rooms, objects and gestures until the ordinary bears the full weight of remembrance.

When I first travelled to the Netherlands, I found myself carrying Bolster's imagery almost unconsciously. Walking the Damrak, descending into Anne Frank's hiding place, standing before the paintings of the Rijksmuseum, I experienced these places not merely as tourist destinations but as extensions of a poetic landscape I had already inhabited through Bolster’s work from home soil. The physical city seemed layered over the imagined one Bolster had offered years earlier, each canal and stoop carrying the sediment of language. 

My own poem, "Nederlands Nostalgia," emerged from that encounter. It is less an imitation than a conversation across time, echoing Bolster's attentiveness to interiors where memory inhabits architecture. Like "Domesticity," it lingers within thresholds: windows fogged by breath, worn stone stoops, museum galleries, and the intimate geography of holding another's hand. Where Bolster observes the anonymous Dutch woman whose careful sweeping creates "an extra room," I wrote myself into those rooms, becoming "the dweller, housed-inwards like a stack of cards," inhabiting both the city and the poems that had prepared me to see it.

Looking back now, it is striking how Long Exposure extends concerns already visible in these earlier collections. Bolster has always written toward the places where private memory intersects with public history, where photographs, paintings, domestic objects, and landscapes become repositories of collective grief. The long lyric sequences of her recent work feel less like a departure than the natural unfolding of a poetic vision that has, from the beginning, understood that history survives not only in monuments and archives but also in the quiet arrangement of light across a room, the overlooked household object, or the lingering trace left by someone who once stood before a window and looked out. My encounter with Two Bowls of Milk and Pavilion years ago became, in retrospect, the beginning of a conversation that Long Exposure now completes, revealing a poet whose lifelong project has been to illuminate the extraordinary depths concealed within the ordinary world.

My work as a reviewer has returned repeatedly to the catalogue of Palimpsest Press, one of Canada's most consistently adventurous independent publishers. Founded in 2000 and based in Windsor, Ontario, Palimpsest has built its reputation on publishing poetry, literary fiction, and creative nonfiction distinguished by technical precision, intellectual curiosity and exceptional design. Through its Anstruther Books imprint, curated by poet Jim Johnstone, Palimpsest has further expanded its commitment to formally innovative and socially engaged contemporary poetry, establishing itself as a home for both established and emerging Canadian voices.

My engagement with Palimpsest's authors has revealed a remarkable continuity across seemingly disparate collections. Melissa Powless Day's A Bow Forged from Ash offered an exploration of Indigenous reclamation and inheritance, where language itself became an act of cultural restoration. In my review, I observed that "language is in a state of reclamation," recognizing how the poems transform grief into resilience while refusing historical erasure. Tracy Wai de Boer's Nostos, by contrast, examined migration, belonging, and emotional displacement through a quieter but equally resonant lyric voice, demonstrating Palimpsest's commitment to publishing poetry that interrogates identity without sacrificing aesthetic complexity. Both collections reveal a publisher attentive not merely to individual manuscripts but to conversations unfolding across contemporary Canadian literature.

Stephanie Bolster's Long Exposure enters this constellation as another example of Palimpsest's editorial vision. Like the books that preceded it, the collection situates private experience within larger historical and cultural frameworks. Whether confronting environmental catastrophe, the ethics of photography, or the lingering presence of history within domestic and public spaces, Bolster's work embodies the qualities that have come to define the press. 

In rising to a social calling, Bolster demonstrates that poetry remains one of the few forms capable of resisting the speed and disposability of contemporary life. Rather than offering answers, Long Exposure dwells in uncertainty, asking what it means to live ethically in an era defined by ecological precarity, mediated violence and collective exhaustion. Its layered and associative form mirrors the fractured consciousness of the twenty-first century while insisting upon the necessity of sustained attention. The result is a collection that lingers long after its final page, a challenging, compassionate and deeply resonant work that reminds us that to witness carefully is itself a radical act.

Thank you to Stephanie Bolster, Palimpsest Press and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.