"I'm sorry, I can't make this beautiful. The line appears in a poem, Red Spring, about agribusiness and its sinister human impact: the world's most widely used herbicide, glyphosate, is advertised as non-persistent; but tell that to Dewayne Johnson // and his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In 2018, a jury ruled that Monsanto's glyphosate weedkiller, Roundup, caused the former groundskeeper's cancer. Solie's admission that real horror can't be prettified recalls Noor Hindi's viral 2020 poem, Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying."
"We all have to keep our eyes open, but that doesn't mean we can't say we're scared, because it's scary. We have to feel like human beings with a spirit in order to do anything about anything, but there are interests that thrive on us being distracted and divided. Art is so crucial, because it counteracts that. Many of the poems in Wellwater centre on plants and animals."
Karen Solie apologises 'I'm sorry, I can't make this beautiful' while addressing glyphosate's human impact and Dewayne Johnson's non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A 2018 jury found Monsanto's Roundup caused his cancer. Solie won the TS Eliot prize for Wellwater. She grew up in Saskatchewan and divides time between Toronto and St Andrews, teaching half-time. Her work focuses on agrochemical monopolies, housing insecurity, wildfires, and nonhuman life. Solie argues art must keep public attention, resist distraction and division, allow fear as a legitimate response, and act as a counterforce to interests that thrive on division.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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