As Is is a study in place, the town of Hamilton Ontario, considering what it means to be connected to or attempt a connection to place as a settler. Many of the poems function as counter-histories, reading the local history and extracting details that get glossed over elsewhere: the first public building being a prison, the public hangings, the botched first treaty. Other poems are situated in the present, the personal, and look at how these founding errors ring through into the present, for both the individual and the community. 

***** 

beholden, by Fred Wah & Rita Wong 

While I was working on As Is, two friends in the span of a week recommended Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s book beholden: a poem as long as the river. Their brilliant poem maps the length of the Columbia River—the largest in the Pacific Northwest—with lines that twist and wind around one another at each bridge or dam that crosses the flow. It’s an excellent example of place writing where form matches content, thought unfolding slowly through and across land and water.

 *

Hamilton: An Illustrated History, by John C. Weaver

John C. Weaver’s Hamilton: An Illustrated History is perhaps the most astute political analysis of the city. Where other books attempt a faux-objective stance, Weaver is up front about his politics and the insights are unmatched. He does a great deal to dispatch the myth of the city’s benevolent origins documenting how power was (is) concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few, those who “have commanded rental accommodation, employment and patronage—the high ground of civic power.”

* 

Whitemud Walking, by Matthew James Wiegel 

The Dënësųłinë́ & Métis writer’s debut collection is a powerful example of place-based writing. Weigel’s focus on treaty was instructive for me and helped me expand the time scale of my book beyond the scope of our relatively young Canadian cities. His microscopic attention to archival materials was also an encouragement to get as close to the primary sources wherever possible. “Here,” he writes, “treaty means reciprocity and obligation. Here, treaty lasts forever.”

 *

The Journey From Tollgate to Parkway, by Adrienne Shadd 

Adrienne Shadd’s The Journey From Tollgate to Parkway is a necessary corrective to the glaring whiteness of so much local history. This book examines the contributions of Black Hamiltonians since the beginning of the city and is filled with important details about the so-called founding fathers that I hadn’t encountered anywhere else, including that neighbourhood namesakes Beasley and Durand were slaveholders. It also features one of the most memorable photos taken in Hamilton: the KKK parading past the Lister Block on James St. N. circa 1930.

*

Deeds/Abstracts, by Greg Curnoe 

As Is begins with an epigraph from this book: “It is a long distance call from London to Putnam (25km). It is not a long distance call from London to Glencoe (50km).” I cut most of the surrounding context from these statements, but the quote comes from a passage where Curnoe is discussing how treaties have “spheres of influence” that persist into the present through something as banal as our telephone areas. While he was of course focused on his own hometown of London, Curnoe’s approach to regionalism and meticulous treatment of history was key for my thinking about Hamilton.

* 

Creation, Sylvia Nickerson

Picking upwhere many other local histories leave off, Sylvia Nickerson’s Creation is perhaps the best contemporary portrait of the city that I’ve read. Nickerson tells the story of Hamilton’s lauded James North St. neighbourhood up into the gentrified present, threaded around moving personal reflections on parenthood and illness. This one certainly features the best colour palette that has ever been applied to the city.

* 

Unbuilt Hamilton, by Mark Osbaldeston 

Osbaldeston’s book is part of a series from Dundurn Press focused on various projects in Canadian cities that never came to be. Certainly lots to like here for the architecture/planning-oriented, but there’s also a broader civic lesson in this book. It helped me to see cities as malleable and shaped by the ideas of persuasive people—whether that be the gutting of the core to build Jackson Square (which narrowly avoided being unbuilt) or the restoration of waterfront access at Bayfront Park. Osbaldeston’s book makes clear that the shape of the city is up for debate and is constantly being negotiated. Like catching a glimpse of all the other possible futures for this place.

* 

Showdown!: Making Modern Unions, by Rob Kristofferson & Simon Orpana 

It’s hard to choose a book of Simon Orpana’s to focus on because his writing (and drawing) across projects is insightful and informed. His collaboration with Matt McInnes, The Brightside Project, documents the destruction of a north end neighbourhood as the steel companies swallowed up the land along the lake, whereas Showdown!: Making Modern Unions is a graphic history of the formative 1946 Stelco Strike. Every time I read Simon, I come away with a more nuanced perspective on this place.

* 

Settler Education, by Laurie D. Graham 

Maybe the book that had the single greatest influence on the poems in As Is, Settler Education was a continual model for how a singular speaker located in the present can access history and its repercussions through the landscape. In particular, Graham shows how the failure to connect, the inability to reach the past at these so-called historical sites, is maybe the truest way to engage with this country’s many silences and erasures. As she writes in “Battleford Gravesite,” “...with no paved route, no federal plaque, you don’t know what respect is.”

*

Learn more about As Is: 

Poetry collection As Is is a study in place, the town of Hamilton Ontario, considering what it means to be connected to or attempt a connection to place as a settler. Many of the poems function as counter-histories, reading the local history and extracting details that get glossed over elsewhere: the first public building being a prison, the public hangings, the botched first treaty. Other poems are situated in the present, the personal, and look at how these founding errors ring through into the present, for both the individual and the community. As Is searches for alternative frames for defining a local identity: expanding the sense of time to include the prehistoric, the fossil record of mammoth and wapiti in the area, and expanding the sense of place to consider the treaty boundary as a possible framework for understanding the region. Unusually for a book of poetry, it attempts reckoning with actual historical record.