Nostos

Tracy Wai de Boer traverses the hero’s journey and the sense of nostalgia in her debut poetry collection, “Nostos.” Published by Palimpsest Press on May 20, 2025, the title of the collection anchors to Ancient Greek epistemology of, ‘homecoming,’ as a hero’s journey of coming into Self. This journey takes place on the sea, an understanding of Self is shaped by adversity, the process is painful, algos, “the literal translation of nostalgia being a painful return home or painful homecoming.” Divided into sections: Nostos/Nostalgia, algos, nostos, and epilogue, I bore witness to the authorial evolution of ‘i’ to ‘I’ throughout these sections. 

“Nostos” is Tracy Wai de Boer’s first full-length poetry collection. She co-authored “Impact: Women Writing After Concussion” winning the Book Publishers of Alberta Best Non-Fiction Award and was named one of CBC’s Best Non-Fiction Books of 2021. She also published a chapbook, “maybe, basically” with Anstruther Press in 2020. As a writer and artist, her work weaves together experimental photography and mixed media. Her works have been published internationally in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Catapult, Plenitude Magazine, Ricepaper Magazine, G U E S T, canthius, Prude Magazine, Petal Projections, and Unearthed Online Literary Journal. 

Wai de Boer enabled me to embrace feelings of vulnerability, an acceptance of the fragility of life in the vastness of the sea in this homecoming. She begins with the image of a toy boat, “And all the while i,/ a toy boat,/ balanced on the wind/ so precarious a sigh might capsize me.” Juxtaposed with photography of the surfaces of bodies of water and angular shots capturing the expansiveness of a beach shore, I could sense my smallness in an environment of heights throughout this poetry and experimental photography. Photos captured by Wai de Boer’s mother from a family camera during art school further adds an artistic layer, for me, of understanding how the author negotiates home and identity. Sun on water, glistening, a lone seagull flying high to a feather floating on the surface. Rocky bottoms with a rippling surface, the water is clear, pristine, but where can I place myself amongst this terrain? 

In an interview with Rice Paper Magazine, Wai de Boer gives context to the hero’s journey.

“Nostos” as a larger concept is represented in The Odyssey, with Odysseus’s long journey home. The idea is that the journey fundamentally changes–even elevates—us, and so when we arrive, we do not arrive as the same person as when we left. This idea seems to represent much of what is happening in the collection, through the journey of “i” becoming “I.”

Striving to elevate, to come back into our pronounced contours and weight, coming home is existing by standing in our own rights, not a smaller ‘i’ existing within something else, unable to stand on our own. 

Wai de Boer is explicit in the differences between these upper and lower case states of being. 

“Later Michelle tells me lowercase poems relate to oral tradition/ -as if one were speaking them./ Maybe i am straining to listen as it pours in through one ear/ perhaps it is spoken- and here i am hearing/ without time for the I’s or Why’s of it.” 

There is a gentleness and strength threaded through with Wai de Boer’s tone and style of writing. Nuances that give effect of simplicity and yet the depth and complexity of life in those minimalist niches. Wai de Boer stopped me and slowed me down. 

She gave me language and a visual of what cyclical time looks like to her. I write this way, sometimes, plundering through larger concepts. For instance, my retaliation between linearity and existence through mechanical time. I write about sacred spirals, something of living as cyclical, natural time. 

Wai de Boer conceptualizes in Cleaning III: 

“What is life when we look too closely-/ this morning i wondered if there really is/ such a thing as forward/ not in a cynic’s way, but watching the waves/ go out and come back in-/ i’m not sure forward is the right frame./ eat, release, eat again/ break, heal, break again/ i cook, i clean,/ i come [right word?]/ if i’m lucky i remember to do so slowly.” 

Coming home is a healing journey. Wai de Boer ‘casts her poetry’ out into tumultuous depths, she lets her tiny paper sailboat life become something surrendered, a letting go for the ‘poem to emerge later.’ She plunges, too, and in that submerging, she gives “ into what was always coming.” I question, as has been done in literature, what control do we have over our fate? Does free will exist? Is the extent of free will the way the writing forms? The way it exists amongst other art forms, like photography, and how the reader takes it in, makes it something of their own, while the poetry remains a part of the author, an author typically with a capitalized “I.” 

Thank you to Tracy Wai de Boer, Palimpsest Press and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.