Junie Desil is a poet and writer living on the territories of the Homalco, Tla’amin, and Klahoose First Nations. Her debut collection, eat salt | gaze at the ocean (Talonbooks, 2020), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her second collection is allostatic load (Talonbooks, 2025).
allostatic load explores the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during years marked by racial tensions, commodification of care, and systemic injustice. It shares the vulnerability and resilience required to heal in a world that doesn’t wish you well, where restoration must co-occur with the planet and each other.
Interviewed by Nancy Issenman
Nancy Issenman (NI): I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to read through your book and read it again, to delve a little deeper than I usually do with poetry books. As someone who has dealt with mental health issues and finds hugging trees an antidote, I feel many resonances within these pages. Yet there’s more, so much more.
Could you elaborate on the “angry Black woman badge?” There are many references in your poems to your experience as a Black woman in Canada. Have you always worn that badge, when did you claim it, is it securely fastened & proudly worn at this time?
Junie Désil (JD): When I reference the “angry Black woman badge,” I’m naming a trope—one that frames Black women as inherently hostile, aggressive, combative, or difficult, particularly when we’re speaking up, setting boundaries, or simply advocating for ourselves. I wouldn’t say I’ve ever claimed or worn that badge with pride. In fact, my experience has often been the opposite: silencing myself, swallowing my words, and over-editing my tone in real time to avoid being cast in that role.
What’s more accurate is that I’ve spent much of my life negotiating how and when to speak—constantly calibrating my voice against the weight of that stereotype. The beauty of growing older is that it’s come with wisdom, and with that, a loosening of the grip that fear and appeasement once had on me. These days, I speak more freely. Not because the risks have disappeared, but because my allegiance to truth now outweighs my desire to be perceived as palatable.
NI: How long did it take to write this book? Did you write the poems first and then organize them into the book or were these poems written with the thread of allostatic load always in your mind? Or some hybrid of that?
JD: The concept for allostatic load came to me around 2019 or so after reading Christina Sharpe’s work In The Wake —particularly her framing of Black life . That language and lens helped crystallize something I’d been feeling but hadn’t yet named: the toll of accumulated stress, the physiological and psychic cost of constantly navigating racism, misogyny, silence, grief – weathering and the weight – allostatic load. Between the pandemic, working, navigating the worsening symptoms of endometriosis, stress, the work took longer and a different shape than I had originally intended. So
maybe five or six years, though not in a straight line. I was writing while trying to answer what does it cost to carry unspoken grief? What accumulates in the body when you’re constantly bracing for impact?
As the title emerged and the concept of allostatic load—the wear and tear of chronic stress—started to anchor the project, I began writing more intentionally toward that theme. So, it was a bit of both: a gradual gathering of poems that already spoke to this condition, and then a more focused period of writing and editing.
In the end, the process was organic but guided. I wasn’t just writing poems—I was mapping an emotional and physiological terrain shaped by race, gender, and memory.
NI: I found this quote: “how to write about what you carry but don’t know.” Did you say this, or did I find it somewhere else? I apologize that I can’t find the reference. But it really resonated with me when I started reading your book. The first poem, “searching for indicators” brings us right into the bodily experience as we follow the palpation of your forearm. We can’t get more visceral than that.
What did you discover about “what you carry but don’t know” by writing so closely from your body?
Why was it important that this be the initial lens through which we first experience your poems?
JD: I love that you found resonance in that line—“how to write about what you carry but don’t know.” That line is from eat salt | gaze at the ocean. It speaks to the gap between sensation and articulation, between what our bodies register and what our conscious minds can name.
Writing from the body—especially in “searching for indicators”—was a way to start from the place of felt experience, not intellectual explanation. I wanted to begin there because that’s how trauma and stress often show up; before language arrives, the body has already told the truth.
By starting the book with a poem grounded in bodily observation, I was inviting the reader—and myself—into that space of unspoken knowing. What I discovered in the process is that the body remembers what we’ve been taught to forget. That memory may be fragmented, but it’s insistent. And when I wrote closely from the body, I began to access griefs and resistances I hadn’t known how to name before.
So, that first poem is not just an entry point—it’s a threshold. It sets the tone for a collection that is trying, again and again, to speak from the place where knowing begins.
NI: In the poem “at work I am asked to review policies” I can see the irony of you writing policy for sick leaves and absenteeisms, when in fact you were “finding yourself in the statistics.”
Can you talk a little about how this role impacted you and the work.
How did your work in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) inform this book in general?
JD: That poem—“at work I am asked to review policies”—came out of a period where I was working in the non profit world. And while I spent some time working in the DTES of Vancouver, I did not want it to necessarily be the focal point of this collection and especially didn’t want to contribute to trauma porn.That said that work and subsequent roles involved a constant straddling of this strange and painful line: being tasked with creating or reviewing policies meant to address harm, while also trying to survive within the very systems producing that harm. Writing policy on sick leave and absenteeism while managing my own burnout, chronic stress, and racial fatigue—it felt like being both subject and object, both the one drafting the rules and the one silently breaking under them.
So yes, there’s irony, but there’s also grief. Because what that role made brutally clear is that equity work inside institutions often demands that we intellectualize our own pain. And there’s a cost to that. There’s a particular kind of disassociation required when you’re turning lived trauma into sanitized policy language—and then watching those policies get diluted or ignored.
That experience absolutely informed the book where I look at what it means to carry institutional violence in one’s body while being asked to fix it in a PowerPoint deck or an HR memo.
NI: In “inheritance” you write “how to/inherit joy where there is little/to bequeath”
Can I assume this has to do with your family/parents/childhood background?
If so could you elaborate a little. Would you say that this scarcity of joy contributed to your future allostatic load?
JD: Yes, that line comes from thinking about my upbringing, but it is not meant to frame my childhood as tragic or joyless. My parents were immigrant, racialized people navigating a new country, racism, and the pressures of survival while raising children. Their focus was on keeping us safe and alive. Joy wasn’t always centered—not because it didn’t exist, but because survival came first. I don’t know if that directly caused my allostatic load, but growing up as a Black child in that context—while also watching my parents navigate a world that wasn’t built for them or for us—definitely had an impact.
NI: “the world, even on sunny days/is filmy gray” comes almost mid-way through your book. Then about 5 pages later there’s “…in the blue light” when you start watching “videos to learn to knit…to build an outhouse…baking bread…” Thus begins what seems like a way back to a body that functions better, with “carewashing” and the deep medicine of nature. The rest of the book, including beautiful short prose poems and birdsong and tree love, is so uplifting. In the end I am cheering!
Can you tell us when and how the shift started happening?
JD: There are two things I want to address in your question. First, a clarification: I coined the term “carewashing,” using it in the same way we might use “pinkwashing” or “greenwashing.” I’m naming how the work of care—especially in social services or institutional settings—can present the appearance of empathy or concern without actually addressing or transforming the root conditions that cause harm.
Second, while you see me turning back to my own body and hoping it can function from a place of healing, I want to be clear that I understand healing has to be systemic. Still, I had to start somewhere. I had to start with myself. I had to release the idea of healing as something individualistic or expensive and instead return to the basics: breathing deeply, being outside, noticing the world around me.
The nature of this work is that there will never be a shortage of need—or of people willing to do the work. And in the absence of a revolutionary transformation in how we care for ourselves, each other, and the earth, the only honest place I could begin was with me. That might sound individualistic, but the truth is, I couldn’t offer anything to others without filling my own cup first.
This shift really began around 2020 and moved slowly. I’d say the most meaningful changes have come in the past year: recognizing toxic workplaces, naming what no longer serves me, and allowing myself to have faith that something better—workwise, health wise, life wise—is possible. Letting go of a scarcity mindset has been key.
It’s still a work in progress, but I feel grateful to be slowing down, spending more time in nature, and living less frantically (most days). I’m more intentional about what fills my cup and what I prioritize. If something doesn’t serve, it doesn’t stay long.