The Unknotter by Christina Wells
above/ground press | February 2026 | $6
Reviewed by Mary Germaine
The problem with Gerry being off work, my mother says, is that he’s out doing the lawn every frigging day. In the full sun of my parents’ backyard in Ontario, I read “The Unknotter” by Christina Wells and next door, Gerry was mowing the whole time. It wasn’t a problem for me, because it turned out the thrum of Gerry’s efforts were a reasonable Mainland substitute for the “soft motor sound” of a fishing boat on the Bay of Exploits, which is the principal setting of Wells’ new chapbook.
Yarns, threads, lines, spinning, weaving, fabric words of all kinds are established metaphors for poetry; writers love the text/textile connection. But Wells’ focus is on even more tangible matters. In these poems, hands, fingers, tongues, and mouths abound, as do hooks, rocks, and rabbits. The tangled fishing line in the bottom of the boat doesn’t symbolize some confusing fiction—it’s a real, physical problem, and the solution will not just straighten out the frayed nylon but prove that some shitshows can be saved.
Kym Greeley, To Sea Agin I Won’t, 2025
Salvation is at the heart of this collection. Moose offal is “resting in mint green Tupperware” and “a bucket full of souls” are tugged at from the deep. So it appears that waste is the worst of sins, even when it’s dazzling, like the roe from a split cod “spilling/and spilling/and spilling,/orange pricks of light.” That rampant Pentecostalism around Notre Dame Bay may have inspired Wells to turn to questions of deliverance, or it could have been the more bizarre scenes of the backcountry. In fact, if they weren’t literally in nature, I would call some of the moments downright unnatural: a bonfire on the ice, or the sunlight gleaming in a codfish’s eye. Poets have gotten religious after dimmer visions.
But for all the references to divine intervention, it’s always the people doing the saving in these poems, never God. So why all the holy rolling? At times, I’m not sure how all the parts of the poems fit together, though the free verse certainly matches the tangles in the subject matter. Such is the danger in writing about the ocean. Wells is looking at a wilderness that can’t be trimmed into submission, a far cry from the lovely green stripes across Gerry’s lawn.
Mary Germaine is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick living in St. John’s. Her book is Congratulations, Rhododendrons(House of Anansi Press).