​Speech Dries Here on the Tongue

Eds. Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Gordon Hill Press, 2025)

​I’m partial to anthologies of investigation over prescription or notions of superiority. Speech Dries Here on the Tongue investigates the link between caring for the earth and caring for its inhabitants. In the preface, the editors make a connection between how we treat each other and how we treat the natural world. They talk about where poetry fits within this connection: whether it makes room for collective dreaming and reimagining of alternatives or for the articulation of pain and frustration*.
 
In her introduction, Karen Houle muses about different ways an ailing rubber tree plant can be treated as an example of living and making art with intention. With this in mind, I enter the anthology with these questions: how do the contributors reimagine living with intention to create a healthy and cared-for planet and inhabitants?
 
The anthology was envisioned during the pandemic, a time of great upheaval and anxiety, death and misfortune that continues today in a never-ending dystopian nightmare of authoritarianism and cruelty. This book is timely and necessary. I feel kinship and solidarity with the contributors and I am grateful for the book.
 
I enjoyed the entire anthology, and here are some of its aspects that merit particular note: 

• Khashayar Mohammadi’s rebelliousness and anguished imagery
• Jennifer Wenn’s breathless doomsday accumulations and concrete imagery
• Amanda Shankland’s specificity and calls to myth and ancient burial grounds
• Conyer Clayton’s compassion for nature and personification
• Maryam Gowralli’s playful structures and mirroring of content of ecological disaster, frenetic tech society and bodies breaking down
• Sydney Hegele’s unique binary and jumbled structured storytelling using the hash mark / causing a whiplash effect as a way to address trauma and dissociative identity disorder
• Gary Barwin and Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s visual poem and short, surreal, playful and evocative poems; I am thrilled that they are collaborating
• gregor Y kennedy’s ability to make anxiety, bipolar disorder, madness, fear, and climate disaster concrete through sound play, concrete imagery and metaphor. And I’m starting to believe I need a things-I-would-write-on-a-t-shirt award for each book I review for the Temz Review, since I’ve mentioned it before in my review of Alice Burdick’s Ox Lost, Snow Deep. And the award this time goes to kennedy for “Prayer in the Age of Climate Change”: “We burned its dictionaries/To roast our chickens” (its refers to the bird language of the nuthatch from Norwich)
•  Aaron Kreuter’s wry humour and playfulness on moods with similes that make me smile and perhaps merit another t-shirt award: “Just peel back the layers like a toy onion” from “Good Mood Fleeting”
•  Concetta Principe’s painterly image and the vividness of the colours as representation of state of mind—so effective
•  AJ Dolman’s logical and unique progressions from quantum theory to scabs and seething rivers in “Contamination”; and from rivers to wine glasses to chimera in “Complacency”
•  Tara McGowan-Ross’s brilliant perceptions and wisdom, and her chilling and tender imagery, evoking for me the quote from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror/which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,/ because it serenely disdains to destroy us./Every angel is terrible”
•  D.A. Lockhart’s ability to balance minimal imagery with minimal language and create powerful, resonant poetry that leads outward. I loved the nod to David Bowie’s Life on Mars in “Revelations about Lilacs in Roblin Lake”, and the way Lockhart is able to be both solemn and playful at once
•  Conal Smiley’s close-up imagery and the poignancy of it. I loved both poems, but “In Blue” blew me away: its rhythm, the end-of-the-world imagery. If for Robert Frost the world ends in ice or fire, here we can see that it will also end in the colour blue. And another song reference, CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising”!
•  nina jane drystek’s set of instructions and the surprise turn of the poem
•  Kathryn Mockler’s metaphor and storytelling skill; her ability to put herself in others’ shoes and reduce arguments to absurdity
•  Karen Houle’s precision, which yields such compassion and wonder because of its specificity and concreteness. What a delight to see a long poem in an anthology of mostly short poems

​After Houle’s poem, I feel breathless as I read poems by the following contributors: Fiona Tinwei Lam, Dominik Parisien, Brandon Wint and Grace Lau.
 
Fiona Tinwei Lam’s poem is minimal and to the point; Dominik Parisien gives us a broken ars poetica in the form of a tree marked by chainsaw teeth; Brandon Wint offers us awe, the restlessness of the moon and water; Grace Lau offers synaesthesia, rain as E-flat minor in Vancouver, the elements water, earth and fire.
 
These are poems to revisit and reread after a day of doomscrolling. Better yet, take this anthology out to a forest and read it to the trees. It’s a resonant and necessary collection that is sorely needed. 

*In my reviews of Concetta Principe’s Disorder and AJ Dolman’s Crazy/Mad in Event Magazine, I commended the commitment of Gordon Hill Press to publish works about mental health and I continue to praise the press here for the same reason. 

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Amanda Earl (she/her) writes, edits, reviews and publishes poetry, prose, hybrid work and visual poetry from the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples (colonially known as Ottawa). Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a long-poem collection about her near-death health crisis. Sign up to her Substack: Amanda Thru the Looking Glass to read quotes of the week, recipes, rants and musings and to get early access to Creatively Yours, her 2026 collaborative offerings with Charles Earl. Visit AmandaEarl.com for information on publications, honours and forthcoming readings.