Something for the Dark (Oskana Poetry & Poetics)

ONE OF CBC's BEST CANADIAN POETRY BOOKS OF 2025

Something for the Dark centres Indigenous knowledge to probe the limits of what we know, confront the unknown, and reckon with our place in the world.

Randy Lundy’s newest collection of poetry―the final in a trilogy that began with Blackbird Song and continued with Field Notes for the Self―turns the poem to our relationships with the land, animals, and people, showing how our failures to see and live by the personhood of all other beings in the world, human and non-, leads inevitably to heartbreak.

As Lundy’s poems accumulate like snow on cedar, his recounting of experiences that transcend language invites the reader to bend their understanding and notice what was once unseen―how a red-winged blackbird clings to a swaying reed, how mist rises after rainfall, how dogs keen and howl, how fingers taste bitter after lighting sage, how hunger smarts, how liquor burns, and how the pain survivors carry is not merely their own.