None of This Belongs to Me

What I love about poetry is its ability to explain how I’m feeling in words I never knew how to say, to paint me pictures of exactly what the moment feels like in images I never thought to create. In her debut poetry anthology, None of This Belongs to Me, Ellie Sawatzky delivers on such moments. Moments in the backseats of cars, in muggy afternoons on farms, in sticky embraces, and in painful recollections of loss.

Sawatzky plays with form, offering everything from quick one-stanza poems to seven-page poems with two-line stanzas. She’s a master of the two-line stanza that tells two different stories depending on whether you read each stanza as a standalone thought or as connected to the next verse. Her poems are simultaneously self-reflective and an invitation.

You can’t help yourself; you have to ask: Am I the “wild child, free from sleep, weird with electricity”? Will I make sense of myself, “the way the night/tries to make sense of its day”? How can I know “what’s me, what’s been inherited” as it’s “inseparable” from the “soft light falling fast behind the lake”?