Thin Slices: Focussing the Lens, Review of Caitlin Stobie’s Thin Slices (Verve Poetry Press, 2022)

Abstract

Caitlin Stobie's collection of poems, Thin Slices, is an experiment in form, literature, philosophy, science, and nature. In science, thin slicing is a method of preparing samples for observation in the field of microscopy, while in psychology, thin slicing refers to the process of the unconscious mind making judgements based on narrow windows of experience. In Stobie's collection, it becomes a literary methodology, too. This short review focusses on how Stobie's intersecting interests in reproductive health, literature and ecology are isolated, magnified, and approximated using poetry as a form of thin slicing.