What is Broken Binds Us

What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care.

In seven sections, Daniel braids the stories of empire, personal traumas, addiction and family estrangement, shifting emergencies, and the wisdom of elders and the natural world. Lessons in Emergency Preparedness traces accident, injury and recovery, facing the trauma of a sudden loss of physical competence through the metaphorical and literal breaks of a shattered body and the slow movement towards mending. When the Tributaries Ran Rich unravels empire and a five-century narrative of hard-working immigrants with the discovery of enslavement in family records, forcing a deep reconsideration of the truth of the past. Episodic Tremor & Slip speaks of the tectonic shifts in family life that occur when facing substance abuse, addiction, and mental health struggles, of the pain of estrangement and the love that continues. In the Family Name is a reflection on time, on people, and on the natural world that revisits and turns over all that came before, exploring it from new angles.

Lorne Daniel writes with calm, conversational assurance. These poems are accessible and evocative, speaking from their specificity to the many people who have faced injury, estrangement, struggle, and pain, and must carry it—and carry on.

Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has written four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC.

Yvonne Blomer, author of Death of Persephone:
The art here is in how the deeply personal and painful is held, almost constrained, within the container of sharp exact language and metaphor; like the Mariana Trench, with its profound depths, as well as its potential to shift.

Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides:
A meditation on unexpected crises and the resilience it takes to endure. Powerful poems that needed to be written.

Puneet Dutt, author of The Better Monsters:
Poems in What is Broken Binds Us confront readers with the complexities of life and loss with a raw honesty and lyrical beauty