“ANTELOPE” by Karen Solie
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “ANTELOPE” by Karen Solie, from Wellwater (2025 Anansi, Picador 2026 FSG), shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
ANTELOPE
By Karen Solie
From Wellwater
They appear out of nowhere as if they know where all the doors are
between our dimension and where they are called
by their true name, where they are not the last survivors
of their evolutionary niche. Understanding does not diminish
their curiosity, and even the great plain aligned to the grid of monoculture
is not monotony, which is painful to them,
but a regularity that gives value to change, and WTF is that
walking on the road? How annoying to be drawn into
another pointless encounter with me;
they huff, brandish their hardware and run,
entering a sublimity of motion that is like the sublimity of night.
As a Gothic spirit loves accumulation, magic, a big-block V8
in a Dodge Polara, they feel inside themselves an extra gear
that will lift them from the earth, from the prairieโs hall
of mirrors, those fences whitetail leap
that they must scrabble under, tearing their cloaks on the barbs.
Only their old-timey machinery can digest the rough forbs.
The jackrabbit finds peace in her evening hollow, deer fold themselves
in elegant anxiety upon their grass couches, but the pronghornโs eye
has been widened in some back-room occult transaction and he haunts
the open country, a candle in the five-mile corridor of his tenfold vision,
sleeping minutes at a time under the shaking rings of Saturn.
Copyrightย ยฉ Karen Solie
From Wellwater (2025 Anansi, Picador 2026 FSG), shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up on the family farm in southwest Saskatchewan. She is the author of six collections of poetry: Short Haul Engine (Brick, 2001), Modern and Normal (Brick, 2005), Pigeon (Anansi, 2009), The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2014 Anansi and FSG), The Caiplie Caves (2019, Anansi, Picador 2020 FSG), and Wellwater (2025 Anansi , Picador 2026 FSG). A volume of selected poems, The Living Option, was published in the U.K. in 2013. Karen has taught writing across Canada, in the U.S., and the U.K., and currently teaches half-time for the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
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