Terese Mason Pierre (Josh Gooden)

“It never really occurred to me to write a poetry book.”

That’s how Terese Mason Pierre, the Toronto writer, editor, and workshop leader explains the genesis of her first collection. 

As poetry editor for the speculative fiction magazine Augur since 2017 (she now holds the title co-editor-in-chief), Pierre has been instrumental in introducing readers to new voices working in the genre field, but the impression she gives is that there was some element of direct engagement with the form that she felt was missing. There came a point, around 2019, when Pierre decided that if she was to continue editing the work of speculative poets, she should get some first-hand experience writing within the genre herself. “I should probably start writing the thing I purport to be knowledgeable about,” she says. 

The result is work such as “Aliens Visit the Islands,” which begins, “There is no leader, so we take them to our women.” Right from its title, the poem locates itself firmly in a speculative mode but, quite befitting its creator, also demonstrates a clear and demonstrable social consciousness: “Our children become friends / with their children, compare the quantity of / fingers, genital shapes, breathing apparatuses, / how to say no.” Pierre also inserts some delightful humour: at one point, “a misfired ray gun” blows up a millipede to the size of a city bus.

“Aliens Visit the Islands” is one of the poems in Myth (House of Anansi Press), the debut poetry collection it never occurred to Pierre to write. It is one of a group of poems in the speculative mode that abut poems more recognizably addressing subjects such as nature, the environment, romantic love, and memory.

While the speculative material in Myth might at first seem outside the traditional realm of Canadian verse, it fits nicely with Pierre’s own sensibility and her understanding of poetry as a form. “I like the idea of poetry being a really interesting – and probably the best – medium to explore speculative content,” she says. “I feel like the poem itself is a very speculative form.”

From there, it was not a huge leap to incorporating elements of myth and story into the other poems in the book. The title poem begins with a mall shooting and is cast in a realist mode, though the speaker’s partner would “rather die through myth” – a movement, typical of Pierre’s approach, beyond the mimetic realm. 

The poems in the collection were written largely between 2019 and 2022; once she began collating them, Pierre realized they shared a similar style and feeling. “I wanted to include mythological figures, specifically from the Caribbean, which is where my family is from,” she says. “I also write speculative fiction and this is very common. You take myths and legends and you incorporate them into your work if it’s culturally significant to you.”

Some of that cultural significance arises out of Pierre’s background. Born in Mississauga, Ontario, she moved with her family to Grenada for three years when she was a child; her perception of the Caribbean as it appears in these poems arises out of that context. She understands the pull of her background, although she also realizes there is something unreal about her memories of Grenada that makes it difficult to write about in any specificity of detail. 

As an adult capable of conceiving of Grenada as a real place with real people and real problems but who has not revisited the island in decades, Pierre views her past through the prism of technique. “This is also where myth comes in,” she says. “I didn’t want to inject a childlike perspective of this very real place – I didn’t want to romanticize it. So, with the aliens poem, it was ‘Aliens Visit the Caribbean’ and I changed that to ‘Islands.’ I didn’t want to situate it in a real place. … I didn’t want to pretend I know what’s going on in people’s lives and their politics and their economic history because I haven’t lived there for 22 years.”

Not all poems announce themselves to the poet in such a personal way. The poem “Appeal to the Doppelgänger” arose out of a Halloween Twitter poll in which she asked her followers what figure she should write about. The overwhelming response was the doppelgänger, leading her to the idea of doing a contrapuntal poem in two columns, which can be read both across and down. “Wouldn’t that be so clever of me?” she asks with a deep laugh. “My only successful contrapuntal poem.”

It also reflects the way poems begin for her, in certain cases, as exercises she sets for herself. Unsurprisingly, these often contain speculative elements, as in the cyborgs and flying cars peppering “In Stock Images of the Future, Everything Is White.” “A lot of the speculative poems were exercises, they were ‘what if’ [ideas],” she says. “The stock images poem is my most-awarded poem. Speculative writers really love that poem. And it’s mostly about how history kind of sucks.”

What seems so remarkable about Pierre’s approach, given the evident technique and carefully calibrated language that pervades Myth, is her assertion that most of the poems she writes appear fully formed, as if from the head of Zeus. This is not entirely accurate, of course: there is a gestation period for her work – she refers to poems as “small pregnancies” that take time to develop, before emerging completely. “They’re like a full baby,” she says. “You don’t edit a baby.”

This is different from her process of writing prose, be it short stories or the novel she is currently working on. Prose fiction is much more meticulous and deliberate in its construction, Pierre says. “Fiction as a form is not very speculative,” she says. “Narratives are very clear. Stories have to do things. My ideas are quite clear and don’t sit in my brain for months the way poems do.”

The poems in Myth follow an upward trajectory, from the depths of the sea to the land to the cosmos. A friend of hers describes the poems as “amphibious,” as they move between elements – water, fire, the land, the stars – which seems exactly right. There is a depth of emotion to the poetry that is held in tension with the strict technical control Pierre exerts, a kind of mind-body duality that is rarely experienced in such stark relief. For Pierre, the distinction between emotion and reason arises naturally in the work and feels emblematic of the way she approaches the world.

“With poetry, I tend to prioritize feeling in content and thinking in form,” she says. “Which also shapes the way I mentally edit. I have all these feelings I want to write about, but I need to have control over them somehow. I need to put them in a shape that is coherent.”

If that shape involves cyborgs or gigantic millipedes, so much the better.