Q: Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. Given that the storm and its aftermath are a primary subject of Long Exposure, did you time the book’s publication to coincide with the 20th anniversary?
A: The timing of the book’s release was coincidental, though it’s a fortunate coincidence in that Katrina and the subsequent levee breaches that wreaked such devastation in New Orleans are back in the public consciousness and may make readers more interested in the perspective the book offers. Sadly, the inequalities the disaster highlighted are even more acute now than they were then, and the climate change that contributed to the storm has only worsened.
I had visited New Orleans twice before Katrina, so I paid particular attention to the news stories during the storm. The extent of the chaos and devastation, and the human suffering caused not only by the storm itself but by systemic failures and inequalities, shocked me.
In 2009, I visited a retrospective of Robert Polidori’s work at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montréal. I had been drawn to his photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl since first seeing them several years earlier, but had avoided writing about them because I worried the subject matter was too predictable, given that I have often written about photographs and that I tend to be drawn to bleak subjects. I was also uncomfortable with the voyeurism of the photographs, which depict human-centered spaces (often private homes) in the absence of the humans who lived and worked there. And I was even more uncomfortable with my own interest in this material.
In the museum that day, I realized that the only way to write about these photographs would be to interrogate my own fascination. I had done something similar in exploring my ambivalence about zoos, but this felt like a riskier, more difficult kind of questioning. I knew I wanted the work that would become Long Exposure to be a book-length poem. I wanted it to centre perspective and work associatively. I had no idea how to write it.
The structural, aesthetic, and ethical challenges this project posed are part of the reason I worked on it for so long. I was also raising two children and teaching creative writing full-time. After a decade, I thought the project was finished, but as I read through the manuscript in the first few months of the COVID pandemic, I couldn’t help seeing connections between events and experiences of that time and many passages in the book. So the project kept expanding, and could have continued to expand had I not decided that I needed to move on.
When Palimpsest accepted the book and I learned that it would appear in 2025, I wasn’t thinking about the Katrina anniversary. I wish we could mark this anniversary by focusing on positive societal and systemic changes that have happened since, as indeed there have been some. But many of those are in the process of being lost, certainly in the U.S. Much of the Lower Ninth Ward, the area most devastated by the levee breaches, has yet to be rebuilt. I stopped working on this book, but the urgency I felt in writing it is not over.
About Long Exposures:
After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster’s fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through us.
About Stephanie Bolster:
Stephanie Bolster’s latest book of poetry, Long Exposure, began as an exploration of Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl, and extended inward and outward from there. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award and was translated into French (Pierre Blanche). Her poems have also been translated into Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby, BC. She has been a professor of creative writing at Concordia University since 2000 and lives in Pointe-Claire, on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti.