p a u s e.

In p a u s e. J. R. Carpenter turns the simple act of going for a walk into a radical practice of attention. Written over the course of a year of daily encounters with kisiskâciwanisîpiy (the North Saskatchewan River) as it runs through amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) in Treaty 6 Territory, this long poem listens closely to water and weather, birds and trees, mudstone and ice, while never forgetting that no geology, no language, and no river are neutral.

Written in short, breath-like fragments, p a u s e. drifts between field note, love poem, and land acknowledgement, refusing settled as a genre. Fossils, wildfire haze, trumpeter swans, city traffic, and pandemic loneliness all pass through its pages, as the poem keeps returning to one insistent question: what happens when we treat noticing as a form of care, and listening as a way of giving something back.