knee deep in high water: riding the Muskwa-Kechika, expedition poems

“Though she walks with ‘crooked steps/ hobbled legs,’ Bronwyn Preece uses existing Indigenous and settler written histories of the Muskwa-Kechika alongside her bursts of short lines to weave together her thoughts, struggles and awe. These poems are as rich in sound and language as the Muskwa-Kechika is in flora and fauna. Preece uses the refrain ‘i am’ throughout to show what she knows and doesn’t know, what she learns and longs to learn: ‘i am/ humbled’ ‘i am alpined’ ‘i am bloodbathed’ ‘i am held.’ Horses, humans, backcountry, floods, mosquitos, knowledge keepers and climate change … and one poet tracking cloud, weather, her own lifeline, her steady resilience.”

—Yvonne Blomer, author of The Last Show on Earth, editor of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds

“knee deep in high water beautifully evokes the vastness of the Northern landscape where time scales are more open to interpretation. Wearing an ‘iridescent festival-fanny pack, packing pepperoni, power bars and painkillers,’ Preece navigates her connection to others, to the land as a settler, and her own physical limits with insight and humour. In these immersive expedition poems, the reader finds themselves ‘summer saxifraged, campioned by moss and rung by jacob’s ladder.’”
—Bren Simmers, author of if, when