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Rewilding Poetry
Natasha Kanapé Fontaine; Howard Scott, trans.
Blueberries and Apricots. Mawenzi $19.95
Penn Kemp
Fox Haunts. Aeolus $20.00
Reviewed by Sunny Chan
Both Penn Kemp's Fox Haunts and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine's Blueberries and Apricots ask readers to re-envision how they place themselves in worlds both natural and of their own making. Fox Haunts uses foxes to navigate a multitude of ideas, as the "fox is both metaphor lurking behind conscious mind and a living creature reclaiming, rewilding our suburbs." There are many types of foxes haunting this work: a cultural symbol, a folkloric trickster, a hero, and a villain, but also a living creature with a life totally separate from humans no matter what we project onto them, a reminder of the wilderness we have fooled ourselves into thinking we have removed ourselves from. One of Kemp's key questions is whether we can respect the Other without forcing it into being something we can relate to, just honouring it as something fundamentally different from us. On the fox as a symbol: "You are no metonymy for the real." Just as the fox is a figure that dances across the interstitial spaces between urban/rural and folklore/reality, the speaker traverses back and forth between fox as autonomous creature and fox as metaphor, for it does serve aptly as metaphor too. In...