Stephanie Bolster's ​Long Exposure

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Palimpsest Press, 2025)

​Braiding disasters into one long poem, Stephanie Bolster offers the tender and the terrible details in Long Exposure. The work offers layered witness to a post-Katrina New Orleans, Chernobyl, Japanese Canadian internment during World War II, and the tsunami in Japan in 2011, while also adding interruptions or asides which depict contemporary anti-Asian racism, Covid-19 lockdowns, the wildfires in Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone, and the murder of George Floyd. Much of the work is written in third person with occasional use of first person. The work also poses questions, which remove the certainty and all-knowing perspective of the third. Bolster chooses to reveal baby teeth in pockets and people evacuated from Chernobyl to wait in a place of roses. These details return the humanity to what can seem dehumanised in the neutrality of a third-person omniscient voice.
 
Anita Lahey has written about the role of the poet as reporter and this book does show Bolster perhaps acting in that role, but not without hesitation. The occasional insertion of the “I” demonstrates the feeling of being a trespasser here; for example: 

​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. 

This book could have been trauma porn, a list of disasters with sensationalized details to shock the reader, but it is not. It includes moments gleaned about those who experienced the tragedies through the lens of a photographer through the lens of a poet. Small details that wouldn't be reported by the media or necessarily noticed by a viewer. The book is clearly a work of much research–there are 127 citations from sources–but Bolster's book, with  a poet's research, is different from an academic's research or a journalist’s news article. It seeks to learn about moments that convey emotion, loss, grief, paradoxes, and out-of-place actions and fits them into a larger picture of humanity.
 
Bolster was unsettled by the photography of Robert Polidori, who showed the aftereffects of Katrina in New Orleans and Chernobyl in the dead zone. There is a tension between the idea of being a witness and being a gawker as disaster unfolds. There is also the clear presence of an “I” who is a writer, the writer of this book:

Someone said Hey you have to write a book
called Rooms with No One in Them,
I said I've been writing it for over ten years.

​In her first poetry collection, White Stone, the Alice Poems (Signal Editions 1998), in the poem “Dark Room,” Bolster writes

​They don't seem to know/I'm here, poet on the corner stool, watching…

​In an interview about White Stone in Studies in Canadian Literature (Volume 24, Number 2, 1999), Anne Compton makes comments about this line and describes it as Bolster putting herself in the poem as witness, a point-of-view between first and third.
 
Many years later, in Long Exposure, this self-awareness of the poet watching and her role as witness or watcher is still there: 

​I was not in Ukraine I was not in the Zone.
Monuments once Soviet were now in Russia.
I was. Here was. 

​Another returning aspect of Bolster's poetry is the photograph as the capture of a moment, also found in White Stone. In Long Exposure, Bolster shows how photographs can reveal details unseen by those who experienced a moment, but also “perception leaves a skeleton,” a quote from an article by Polidori, paraphrasing Dieter Appelt.
 
And there’s the opening epigraph, a quotation from Polidori that Bolster chooses for the book: 

​The snapshot is a moment that will never occur again, and the long exposure is of a moment that never occurred to begin with.

​I love the different possibilities for the reading of this book because of the braiding, because of the structure. I could go back and read specifically of Katrina by reading only the sequence LONG EXPOSURE threaded throughout the book, or SHELTERED OBJECT or WAVE. I love the flexibility this structure has made possible.  I also think of the way disasters and trauma disrupt linearity, mess with time and the regular structure of daily life. This braided structure seems like a fitting form to articulate upheaval and disruption. 

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Photo credit: Jim Johnstone

Amanda Earl (she/her) writes, edits, mentors, publishes, reviews and makes vispo on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Earl offers a 12-hour poetry mentorship program, and thanks to a patron, one scholarship is available. Earl is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry.  Please visit AmandaEarl.com for more information or subscribe to Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for musings on finding joy in difficult times.