Though the terrorist bombing of Air India flight 182, travelling from Montreal to Delhi, took place more than 25 years ago, it remains an open wound in the Canadian psyche. Of the 329 people killed in the crash, 268 were Canadian, the worst incident of mass murder in Canadian history. The trial dragged on for almost 20 years, was cripplingly expensive, and stands as one of the greatest failures of the Canadian justice system. As recently as 2010, a special commission was still conducting an inquiry into how the crime was successfully carried out, and how the investigation went so wrong.

The incident and its fallout have inspired documentaries, investigative journalism, and now a poetry collection by Renée Sarojini Saklikar. Saklikar’s aunt and uncle were aboard the plane; her own personal grief, combined with the tragedy’s under-representation in contemporary Canadian history, inspired the text. The book focuses on the 82 children who perished in the explosion and subsequent crash, but also reaches beyond that to address the public performance of grief, the profoundly intimate and lonely nature of pain, and the institutional betrayal that compounds personal loss.

The book is a testament, both vulnerable and damning. The poems replicate various personal and public responses to the attack: exhibits, archival objects, invocations. Saklikar wrestles with vast, devastating emotions, while at the same time gently cradling individual lives, allowing them to stand as their own record of loss. One victim “plays ice hockey,” another wears “black socks” of “fine-gauge wool.” Saklikar pairs the erasure of the victims’ bodies with the redaction of details in official documents and the retraction of evidence in court.

The collection doesn’t seek to impose any answers, or suggest any recompense for the loss of so many innocent lives. It holds what details it can, preserves and honours them in a way official investigations failed to do.