“Welcome to Russell Books: an indie bookstore on an island in the Pacific Ocean, where anemones dispense life advice and staff recommend books to mollusks,” reads Guernica Editions’ description of Zoe Dickinson’s debut book of poetry: Staff Picks for Invertebrates.

“Zoe’s poetry is rooted in British Columbia’s Pacific coastline with a focus on local ecology,” as her bio reads. She’s a manager at Russell Books in Victoria and from 2020 to 2023, was Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series. She continues to volunteer as a board member and you can see her on Friday nights at PEP, hosted by Russell Books, making sure readers and audience members are comfortable as they gather to listen to poetry.

Zoe’s chapbooks Public Transit (Leaf Press, 2015) and intertidal: poems from the littoral zone (Raven Chapbooks, 2022), were both award winners.

In my blog review of intertidal I said: “This is a poet we can trust with her astute observations, knowledge, and a reciprocal relationship with what surrounds her.” Zoe considers the creatures she has come to know in the ecology of Vancouver Island, her “more-than-human neighbours.”

Intertidal as well as Zoe’s new book, Staff Picks, begins with “I’d like to start by acknowledging that this poem is being / written” followed by:

on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples:
the Songhees and Esquimalt nations.

The poem also acknowledges that

.. . . . my life takes place
where someone else’s life could be happening
                   that where my apartment building sits,
                   someone should be gathering camas bulbs
                   but instead, not far away, she is boiling water
                   before mixing her baby’s formula.”

The term “camas bulbs” carries a lot of weight and story. The Beacon Hill area of Victoria was one of the most productive camas territories on Vancouver Island where the lək̓ʷəŋən harvested camas bulbs for food and trading. White settlers altered that traditional practice when their cattle grazed the tops of the camas plants and pigs rooted up the bulbs. Acres of camas fields were planted with other crops such as oats, wheat, and potatoes. Houses would follow and apartment buildings as Zoe notes in her poem.

As for “staff picks,” you’ve probably seen the denotation on shelves at libraries and bookstores. In Zoe’s case, the book’s title poem has suggestions for invertebrates. Among them are the hermit crab, sea urchin, acorn barnacle, and nudibranch, a sea slug known for its spectacular colours and shapes.

For the oyster, The Creative Act by Rick Ruben is recommended as

Rick understands this essential
truth about pearls  
and poetry:  
what we create will coalesce  
around the things we need to heal,  
or conceal.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, is suggested for the giant pacific octopus.

. . . I think you’d like
Emily – how she retreated to her den
and doled out words,
each poem’s coiled complexity
delicious as a prawn’s tail.

You can see by the book’s cover design by Rafael Chimicatti, and the poems inside, that Zoe Dickinson’s bookstore is no ordinary indie bookstore. As she writes in “what it is”:

The bookstore has roots
with mycelial networks
as complex and responsive
as neurons in the brain –

The store isn’t all magic as there are customers of the human kind that make for “fragile places” as one poem describes. “Some vandal throws a garbage can / against the store window,” and burglars break in through the loading bay, emptying locked cases of rare tomes including a signed copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

And there is “the shoplifter” wearing “the same red velvet tracksuit” and the customer who hasn’t bathed in a year and a half, he says, and smiles in “how to wake up.” There are those who call with strange questions that they could Google on their own such as described in “customer service.” And there’s the kid who rubs his saliva-coated palms on the “escalator’s smooth / rubber handrail.” The title of that poem: “dumbstruck.”

The escalator in Russell’s is a significant presence and is turned off for poetry readings. Described as “the captive god,” it gets its own poem in Staff Picks: “the escalator.” While the escalator “browses our romance section” after dark, the poem’s speaker can’t help but think of being at the edge of a cliff and imagining falling off “in grisly detail.”

You can’t imagine what is contained in the used books brought in to “the book trade counter.”

Each book tells two stories:
what’s written on the page,
and what happened to the page

The unexpected items found in used books include:

wedding photos, grocery lists, fall leaves,
a blade of grass  
a strand of cooked spaghetti  
a sewing needle

and once
a newborn’s hospital record,
the baby’s footprint achingly perfect
in crisp blue ink

Wow, Zoe saved the most poignant one until the end.

We book lovers love bookstores and I love the way Zoe describes hers in “it is not your friend.”

The bookstore is not anyone’s home
but at dusk, its windows
are the same shade of yellow
as the kitchen window in the house
                  where you grew up

And to close her tribute to the bookstore:

It is not your friend
but it will introduce you to the love
                          of your life.

That “love of your life” could be a book, definitely, or could be someone browsing in the same aisle.

If it’s “chicks” you’re looking for, there are sections to avoid as advised in “where not to pick up chicks at a bookstore.” One of them is

Romance

Is a lot to live up to
don’t approach
unless you can promise
happily ever after

You’ll learn new terms in Staff Picks (like “fuzzy onchidoris” in the poem titled “nudibranch” and “tapestry of hyphae” in “lichen” and if you don’t understand them, don’t call Russell Books – unless you’re looking for a book about invertebrates or Zoe’s book of course. You could join the Field Naturalists as Zoe has or engage the help of Marine Detective Jackie Hildering.

One of Zoe’s gorgeous poems is “aubade” which is a form either welcoming or mourning the arrival of dawn. I’ll leave you with another piece of writing by Zoe, this one from Facebook, about the night sky and the bookstore she loves:

Locking up after @planetearthpoetry tonight… Russell Books glowing in the dark. I’m listening to an advance reading copy of Suzanne Simard’s new book, When the Forest Breathes, and she of course is all about the complex web of symbiotic relationships happening under the forest soil, in which different species nourish each other. Anyway Russell’s is like that, a bit. A seemingly homogeneous pile of stuff (i.e. a metric crapton of books) that is more complex the deeper you look, almost fractal in its depth of detail, and that improbably supports an amazing variety of life.

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