“Balanced between lyricism and experimentation, Scientific Marvel takes an incisive and wide-ranging approach to observation, navigating modern concerns with wit, beauty and sensitivity. Crafting poetry from sources as disparate as case law and interpersonal relationships, Undi explores facets of belonging and place with rigour and a refreshingly bold voice.”
—Peer assessment committee: Kathryn Mockler, Heather Nolan, and Tolu Oloruntoba
Chimwemwe Undi is a poet, editor, and lawyer living and writing on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her work has appeared in Brick, Border Crossings, Canadian Literature and BBC World, among others. She was the recipient of the 2022 John Hirsch Emerging Writer Award from the Manitoba Book Awards, and she is the Winnipeg Poet Laureate for 2023 and 2024.
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Imagine you could spend a day with any person, living or dead. Who would you choose and what would you do?
I feel like I should pick a writer, but I’m too shy to pick a living one and would only pick a dead person if I could time travel back to their time; any hero of mine would be baffled at the state of the world and I would be too embarrassed to explain.
So probably Björk. We would take a very long walk on a cool day, which I love doing, and then ideally, I could finally see her perform live.
What advice would you give your ten-year-old self about 2024?
Hang in there.
Who has been the biggest influence in your journey as a writer?
I could not pick a single person. I have joked that the hardest part of writing Scientific Marvel was writing the acknowledgements section, because I wanted to list every person I had ever met.
What did you learn about yourself as you worked on Scientific Marvel?
I learned or was reminded to follow the direction of my curiosity. All of my favourite poems in the collection came from that place of wondering what questions would be interesting to think through in a poem, what forms would be fun to work on or cool to read.
What was the last book by a Canadian author that changed you in some way?
Bren Simmers’ The Work, which I will admit I came to through the shortlist. The gradual erasure in that middle section is devastating, and so elegantly balances the formal metaphor for emerging gaps in language with really great lyrical writing. I plan to gift it to another poet or two, which is among my highest forms of praise.
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Excerpt from Scientific Marvel
PROPERTY 101
This I know how to do: reduce a person to their facts
unsympathetic to condition, either useful
or distinct. Good practice is dissolving my beloved
into traits, serving the language that I serve, and work against,
to dupe. I am advised that an example of violence
is not violence, like a photograph in a museum,
transformed by the lens and then by display. Because I am
advised I turn advisory, surmise the gaps were not
openings through which to shine my particular night,
dark as the din of this country’s measured silence.
This is to say I am learning about property
in a recent nation where no one looks me in the eye.
What spectacle elides by calling itself analysis:
hallways, riddled with exits, each an error to pass.