It’s been 13 years since Elizabeth Bachinsky published her last collection, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History, a long time for a writer to go between books. Nightwood Editions has just released her sixth volume, Real Grownup, which, for the poet, is simultaneously a return and a source of anxiety. “I was fairly convinced no one would even remember me,” she says on the phone from her home in New Westminster, B.C.

It’s not as though Bachinsky has been idle for the past decade and a bit. “I’ve been doing all kinds of things,” she says.

When she turned 40, she became the chair of creative writing at Douglas College because, she says, everyone else in her department retired. Following her four-year tenure, she took a break, lived through COVID, and was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She also fried her laptop, losing pages of poetry and the beginnings of an essay on Lydia Davis’s translation of Proust – the reconstituted essay now opens Real Grownup.

But the most important thing she did over her period of semi-retirement was give birth to her daughter, who is now 11. “The number one thing I’ve been doing is I’m a mom.”

Becoming a mother has clearly influenced Bachinsky’s poetry; a number of the poems in her new collection deal with her daughter, including one that compiles rhyming couplets from songs Bachinsky listened to after giving birth that remind her of her child. Then there’s “Don’t Touch My Baby,” in which an old man makes a “beeline to coochie-coo” a child, prompting the mother to shout the poem’s title in his direction.

Bachinsky says her daughter is enthusiastic about appearing as a figure in her new book. “I don’t think she really understands what it means to be in print,” Bachinsky says. “But she thinks it’s pretty cool to be part of a book.”

With Real Grownup, for the first time, Bachinsky ensured that every living person she wrote about had a chance to see the poems before they went to press, a testament to the highly personal nature of the work. This was especially significant for intimate work like the short poem “Shitting the Bed,” a pair of tercets about a particularly nasty illness the speaker’s husband experienced. Bachinsky credits her husband, Blake, with being her first editor, someone who reads the poems out loud so that she can hear how they sound to her ear. When he got to “Shitting the Bed,” she was nervous about how he would react to it. “He said, ‘Go for it. No problem,’” Bachinsky says. “My entire family has been so supportive. They know that I’m an artist and I’m putting it in there for a reason. And I love that poem.”

The poems in Real Grownup are a mixture of formal lyrics, blank verse, and prose poetry, all told in straightforward, accessible language. There is an almost brutal honesty in places, highlighted by the speaker in “Shame,” who looks back on her adolescence and ends by insisting, “And now I am much older. Hiding nothing.” The plainspoken nature of the poems is central to Bachinsky, who wants people to be able to engage with the volume. “It’s important to me that lots of people can understand what I’m writing,” she says. “That my dad can read it and say, ‘Oh, okay, I kinda see what you’re up to.”

Bachinsky has said in the past that she values working with poetic constraints, and some have been far stricter than anything on offer here. Her 2012 long poem, I Don’t Feel So Good, was made up of lines from 26 volumes of her journals, each line determined by rolling a die and copying it down in the order the die dictated. For this new book, Bachinsky says the form and the content are closely intertwined.

“Sometimes the content will decide the form for me,” she says. “‘Matryoshka’s Singularity’ is a pantoum. I needed something that was really cyclical and repetitive. I needed something really tied up.” The penultimate poem, “Fern Hill,” exactly replicates the number of lines and metrical rhythm in Dylan Thomas’s poem of the same name. The prose poems scattered throughout the book arose out of summer writing sessions Bachinsky leads; when she saw how they operated in context, she realized that they provided a kind of narrative propulsion to the collection. “This is the only book I’ve written that is meant to be read from start to finish.”

Real Grownup appears at a fraught time in history and follows a number of years of upheaval in the poet’s own life. And while the poems are not explicitly political, Bachinsky, who is Ukrainian by background, does feel that the work can operate as a means of pushing back against dominant ideologies or political realities. She recalls being at a fundraiser for the war effort in Ukraine, where a woman from a Ukrainian television station asked her if she thought poetry could be an act of resistance. Bachinsky answered in the affirmative. “Just writing it is an act of resistance,” she says. “Because it’s outside of commerce. It really can’t be part of being anything other than what it is.”

That said, Bachinsky is also adamant that poets need not be explicitly political in their work. As a teacher, she sees this notion as especially damaging for young people, who may find that dictating a position they need to take will kill the joy in writing. So, after six books and a 13-year hiatus, does Bachinsky still get joy from writing poetry? “Surprisingly, yes,” she says. “I really, honestly can’t believe it.”

Photo of Elizabeth Bachinsky by Leslie Biggard.