The Mechanics of Dwelling: Karen Solie’s Early Poetry and Short Haul Engine

Abstract

Karen Solie’s poetry redefines the ways in which language problematizes contemporary issues such as climate change, the nature of our physical environments, the conception of agency, the politics of gender, and our understanding of the increasingly divergent social orders we inhabit. This article focuses on Solie’s early poetry and her first book, Short Haul Engine. It aims to explore her aesthetic values and to identify some of the prominent motifs and concerns that animate her work. Solie is interested in thinking about the particular conditions and consequences of decisions made, paths taken, relationships begun and broken. But she is also interested in critique as an epistemological form of inquiry: how do we know what we think we know, and what factors account for that knowing? One aesthetic principle uniting many of the poems is the identification of absence as a key to desire – the need to explore desire as a means of accessing what is beautiful through what is lost, absent. Paradoxically, language does not always provide a means of accessing experience; it often gets in the way, turning the person behind the words into a creature of imprecision – the “near miss” of accurate description becoming a central problem in the poetry itself.