Melanie Dennis Unrau's ​Goose

Reviewed by Jérôme Melançon

(Assembly Press, 2025)

​It is not simply a matter of pride and acquisitiveness (or greed) that the oil and gas industry is such an important part of the common identity in the Canadian prairies, and especially in Alberta. This identity was forged slowly, over decades, as a collective project with which individuals could identify and in which they could aspire to participate, all the while reaping benefits they expected to be enormous. Melanie Dennis Unrau found traces of the creation of this individualistic, not-quite-collective identity in publications by S. C. Ells (and especially Northland Trails). In Goose, Unrau deconstructs and more importantly dismantles Ells’ ideological constructions, as well as his economic, scientific, and literary ambitions, including his hope to be recognized as the father of the tar sands. And beyond this work on Ells’ texts, in the process of manipulating them, she gives her readers a space to free themselves from the ruinous imaginary of exploitation and extraction he contributed to creating.
 
Unrau draws on practices of visual poetry and erasure poetry, but the physical practice she developed for this book has more to do with the choice of what is to be kept than what is to be removed. She hand-traced the words and drawings from the original publications, adding new pages over previous ones, sometimes superposing them, presenting the text on the page in different arrangements. Consequently, each page contains many pages at once and becomes a reconfiguration of threads that already ran through the original work. The superposition of words and drawings, which is always limited to a few sites of disturbance of whatever order and balance was left for them in Ells’ text, gives them the status of signs—signs that are either undecipherable or that gain an indeterminate meaning. Separating them from what Ells meant to have them signify, Unrau lets us see these words and drawings without allowing us to force patterns or meanings upon them. Some pages present a cloud of punctuation, swarming insect-like; some show the equally senseless repetition of the words Ells favoured to share his perspectives on the land and his ideas for what could be done with it, words Unrau also saves from his prose. Ells becomes external to his own writing, his self intact but his actions and ideas dismantled. We are left with countless geese, pages full of words and metaphors and drawings, and the Métis and First Nations men who pulled scows full of tar sand up the Athabasca river, bound to them through ropes and harnesses.
 
Unrau forces us to read the text with the same kind of effort exerted by the trackers who pulled the scows upstream, watching each word like they watched each step, getting stuck in place as words become layered, bottomless, and forcing us to proceed one word at a time. She makes both Ells’ discourse and her own difficult, strenuous. Breathing becomes arduous, the phrasing irregular. She takes away the power of enchantment that is proper to a poetic discourse by making us read repetitive sounds rather than words, loosing their meaning as she retains them from reaching for other words. She makes sentence construction a constant effort by going against the alignments we expect in English, forcing us to climb up or carefully climb down diagonal lines only to make our way backwards, never quite sure of where the path will wind and suddenly stop at dead ends. She makes it impossible to gloss over any element of Ells’ writing, or for him to refine his experiences into something that is immediately consumable. She forces Ells’ text to reveal what he dismissed as unimportant, what he kept off his pages, what did not fit his heroic narrative.
 
And she brings back those people and communities he assimilated, apparently effortlessly, into his own story. One of the great merits of this book is the shift in human perspective it accomplishes, due to the relationships Unrau developed with the Métis of McMurray who, like many Métis communities, define themselves in great part through the economic role they played or, more precisely, were allowed to play.
 
She shifts the perspective even further, beginning the book with 28 pages of geese: geese sounds, actions, drawings, all rearranged to give them free reign over the space of the page, against their imbrication into Ells’ narrative. This first section morphs into Ells himself, questioning and ridiculing his possible identification with the geese, and showing how fascination is in no way antithetical to the destruction of what fascinates.
 
In reproducing the drawings of geese and Indigenous men Ells brought to his pages and the words through which he let them appear, Unrau detached them from the project into which they were forcibly incorporated. Instead of being displayed and used for metaphors, they gain an autonomy that is commensurate to having been present before Ells, before the tar sands, before the destruction. She keeps what was already present and the modes of human life that adapt to the life that was already on the land, and separates it with what Ells and resource extraction have brought, this sticky, heavy, tar-like material that is a language imposed on a life it means to help destroy.
 
Goose is a medium through which we can look at what discourse makes disappear. It brings us closer to words by removing the surplus of meaning that comes with their use, but only after they are used. Unrau’s practice gives us something akin to cleaning pages and recycling the materials that can still be of use, to help rid us of what has purposely been placed in the way of our imagination. 

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​Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. It follows his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that often have to do with colonialism and the attempts we make to disentangle ourselves from it. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.