bookhug press – ROSES AND REVIEWS

Expansive and enveloping, Shannon Webb-Campbell’s collection Lunar Tides asks, “Who am I in relation to the moon?” Which, in turn, poses a very meta question: who are we in relation to the natural world? As Jane Austen would say, “What are men compared to rocks and mountains?”

These poems explore the connections between love, grief, water and the moon. The collection is structured like the lunar calendar, into moon phases, like the cycles of life, or the stages of grief.

“What phase was the moon when she left? / How high or low were the tides?” This short couplet begins the collection and likens the phases of the moon to the phases of life, asking who are we when we pass? Will our goblet be full or empty?

Lunar Tides follows the rhythms of the body, the tides, the moon, and long, deep familial relationships that are both personal and ancestral. Originating from Webb-Campbell’s deep grief of losing her mother, Lunar Tides charts the arc to finding her again in the waves.

Earth energy shoots through your body

you inner garden hydrates

vines grow stronger to your mother
Bloodstone New Moon

The poem Bloodstone New Moon associates breathwork with healing energy. Breathing is used as a way to connect with a higher power, and, in this case, with her mother. Though the physical channels are different, we may still connect to the ones who have passed, as Webb-Campbell suggests.

The poems in Lunar Tides seek to define grief, and ultimately find a path toward healing. We, all of us, have two mothers: Our human mothers, as well as our Mother Earth. To understand that connection is to understand ourselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shannon Webb-Campbell is a mixed Indigenous (Mi’kmaq) settler

poet, writer, and critic. She is the author of Still No Word (2015), recipient

of Eagle Canada’s Out in Print Award, and I Am A Body of Land (2019;

finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry). Shannon holds an MFA in

Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and a MA

in English Literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland and

Labrador, and is pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of New Brunswick

in the Department of English. She is the editor of Visual Arts News

Magazine. Shannon is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation and

lives in Kijpuktuk/Halifax in Mi’kma’ki.

Thank you to Book*hug Press for sending me a free Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) of this title. All opinions are my own.

It’s hard to describe this work because it is so meta. It is a really little book that tackles a really big topic: Existence. Less than 135 pages encapsulates the human experience and asks what is it that really makes us alive.

“Is it a question of name? Could I be a human if you called me one?”

“I have never not been employed. I was made for work.” Literally, because employees on the Six Thousand Ship are basically robots that were created for work, humanoids coexisting beside real humans who have been in space for so long they have forgotten their humanity. Both seem to be adopting traits of the other: the humans are becoming more like the employees, and the employees are learning how to be human. And what happens when a humanoid begins feeling emotions? Crying? Showing desire, fear, and anger?

“I feel a similar longing to be human.”

“‘I hate interface,’ my humanoid co-worker said the other day.” But how can a humanoid have feelings that were never programmed into their being? And still, the employees are seen developing “strategies in dealing with emotional and relational challenges,” raising questions like can computers learn to program themselves?

“Am I human or humanoid?”

And for the crew, when the lines of reality blur, they begin to question everything. “I started to wonder who I actually am here. An employee, a human, a programmer, Cadet 17 of the Six Thousand Ship.”

“I don’t know if I’m human anymore. Am I human?”

This is an extremely relevant message for today’s world, where the lines between reality are beginning to blur with technology and social media.

“Tell me, did you plant this perception of me? Or did this image come up from inside me, if it’s own accord?”

In a larger sense, this work poses a metaquestion — is it ethical to play god over our creations? Where is the line drawn between human and inhuman? Can computers and robots learn to gain consciousness, will they eventually become human? And what happens if they can, or when they do? On the flip side, are humans becoming more robotic, and how will it impact our future?