By Meredith Grace Thompson
Claimings and Other Wild Things, the debut poetry collection from queer, non-binary poet Noelle Schmidt, is filled with echoes, reverberations, becomings, and claimings. It is a gathered collection—a found collection. Schmidt is a poet on the rise, a poet in the making, crackling with self-effacement, and yet bounding with self-worth, learning and growing and finding and filling their place in the Canadian literary world.
The collection is lyrical, verging on confessional, dancing through the effervescence of thought, and landing for brief moments on memory, exploration, finding, and changing, before continuing to flow forward. Pushing against but never resting on structures of contemporary spoken-word poetry, Noelle Schmidt’s speaker loudly asks poignant questions of the world around them. In the titular poem, they exemplify the grandiosity attempted throughout the collection with the metaphoric claiming of self in a glory of the non-binary.
This collection explores the power of claiming, and subsequently the power of the label. The non-binary poet rises to meet me, the non-binary critic, and we both are seen by one another in a beautiful and encapsulating way. The strength and experimentation of the collection exists in the individual poems, rather than in the structure of the whole. What the larger collection does do is present an argumentation for the question and necessity of labels, of definition with the everyday for the non-binary speaker, and both the freedom and limit of those labels.
The authenticity of these poems, in the way that they cling together and yet stand apart, is something quite beautiful. This collection feels like a chrysalis, standing on the edge of its own becoming. The voice of these poems is in a state of agitation and of growing. The agitation comes from the need to shed the old and become what is new. There are many claimings in this collection and many wild things. I look forward to reading what Noelle Schmidt creates next.
Thank you to Latitude 46 Publishing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.