Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird’s When Whales Went Back to the Water creates a reverent container for a broken world. These poems are hymns to living in wonder through loss, joy, motherhood's sleepless nights, domestic violence, and isolation. Offering a courageous account of queer intimate partner violence, including the impacts of femme erasure in queer communities, this book is also grounded in the tastes and textures of a new parent’s everyday—keenly interested in our capacities during personal and global catastrophe amidst diaper changes and playground dramas. Haunted by hawks, coyotes, frogs, and forests, the collection also speaks to the power of the beyond-human sphere in the translation and transformation of pain and sorrow. Reaching beyond stories of survivorship to touch on personal and collective pain with tension, nuance and care, Baird’s poems remind us that grief is inextricably intertwined with love and joy.

Lisa Baird (she/her) is a queer poet, essayist, parent, and community acupuncturist living in Thadinadonnih (“the place where they built) on the lands of the Attawandaron/Chonnonton people, and current treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, also known as Guelph, Ontario. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Room Magazine Poetry Contest and longlisted for the 2020 and 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. Baseline Press published her chapbook, Persephone’s Crickets, in 2024. Baird’s first poetry collection, Winter’s Cold Girls, was shortlisted for the 2020 Relit Award. Find her at www.lisabaird.ca and on Instagram @eramosageese.

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