Christina Shah lives in New Westminster and works in heavy industry. Her work was shortlisted for 2021’s Ralph Gustafson Prize and selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2023. rigveda was her first video poem and chapbook (Anstruther, 2023). if: prey, then: huntress (Nightwood, fall 2025) is her first full length collection.
In this collection, Shah’s muscular poetry finds beauty in industrial landscapes. Short and forceful, the poems’ sharp lines stick with the reader.
Interviewed by Alli Vail
Alli Vail (AV): Thank you for joining the poetry event at the Victoria Festival of Authors this year. I’m curious about your perspective as a poet — we live in such an instant gratification culture but poetry takes time to write, read, and understand. What can poetry do for a reader?
Christina Shah (CS): Thank you for the opportunity to participate, Alli! I’m excited. So much to unpack here. For me, poetry is a postcard from yourself that you take wherever you go. It’s one way to connect with the smallest, most private aspects of oneself, as well as the largest in terms of who we are (or what we could aspire to) in society, in nature, in this cosmos. It holds both connection and solitude. It’s both a window into the past and future imaginings. It inoculates the reader against passivity and hopelessness. Other features and benefits: emotional comfort, fostering empathy, and simply play. Free thought. Irreverence. Speaking truth to power. Preserving childlike curiosity. Meditations on beauty. The truth of human messiness and greatness. It’s the pilot light of the human spirit.
AV: Poetry is often a delicate and ethereal thing but your poems have a real physicality and muscularity to them. For example, in pinky laundry you write “pregnant, trembling, spinning / boxing bloodied socks and jeans”. In x ray clinic you write “take a number and they’ll see to / your meat and bones.” Other times I swear I can smell the grease. How does your work in heavy industry influence your poems?
CS: Well, these environments are where I spend a good part of my days. They certainly influence my work poetry, but I see how that ‘muscularity’ finds its way into non-work poems, as part of the scenery (in the example you just mentioned), or just in terms of the ‘kinesthetic’ language that I use. Because I am (sometimes literally) seeing the blood and guts of the world, that can’t help but inform my perspective. The decay and breakdown (mechanical and human) scenarios I encounter in various industrial landscapes provide plenty of inspiration.
I suppose it makes my language a bit choppier and more compact (and also more concentrated) because that’s the kind of communication I encounter (and, out of necessity, engage in) all day. However, I start with the ear. Being sound-driven is important to me. It still has to roll.
I have also noticed that my later work has become more compressed, and I tend to write more prose poems — or do away with traditional stanzas altogether.
AV: Your work often has an industrial feel to it and you write about this rougher side of work. What inspires you to take a second look at something that is often dirty and not known for its beauty and turn it into poetry?
CS: I am often drawn to an object’s textural qualities, or I simply see odd shapes and take a moment to imagine what else they might look like. For example, the other day I saw several ovoid sliced offcuts of toilet paper rolls scattered in the yard of a paper mill. I imagined that they looked like eyes, cowrie shells, or bleached lamprey maws. I get to see many parts or pieces of equipment that are oddly-shaped (or just unfamiliar), and I use my imagination. Random strange objects or textures. Some of the large rotating equipment is also quite hypnotic. Sometimes I think, what would that look like to someone who’s unfamiliar? A child or someone from another culture? I feel like an animator sometimes.
AV: Food makes an appearance in your work too, with poems titled sea food department, prawn, prosciutto, and (my favourite) ‘fettuccine all’uovo No. 94’. What draws you to food imagery you turn into something that is not about food at all?
CS: All of us are craving sensory experiences and sustenance. Food is such a basic. We work in order to eat. I do enjoy cooking and eating, and food is such a basic way to bring people together. Bruce Springsteen sings that “everybody has a hungry heart”. Ultimately, we are all mammals looking for food and shelter and safety in connection. It’s another facet of the book’s theme, from both the perspective of the huntress and the hunted (especially as it relates to fishing).
AV: In ‘botulinum toxin’ and ‘gel nails’ you give beauty treatments a much needed side-eye. What do you think a poet can uniquely bring to the larger conversations about beauty standards today?
CS: We can bring sensitivity to the topic of aging, as Kate Braid has done in her latest work, The Erotics of Cutting Grass. It’s an antidote to a world mediated through Instagram filters. Poets can examine and appreciate the richness and variations of the body at every stage of life, and we can provide a place to acknowledge the feelings around the pressures women face. And of course (poets being rebels by nature), we can also laugh at how ridiculous it can be (and if you don’t laugh, you have to cry — which means smeary mascara!).
AV: The imagery you use is so visceral and sometimes gives an aha moment. My favourite line, in bad soup, is “it’s a gut punch — / worse than sand in vaseline” and I instantly felt that in my body. I could feel what you were saying. What’s it like for you when you’re writing and you come up with a line that really resonates with you? Where does some of this imagery come from?
CS: It’s like lightning. It’s an explosive moment, or even a dropping into place. I live for it. For me this imagery often starts with the ear. Two sounds collide and spark an image. The images are a moment of presence, with stillness at the core. A snapshot, or even some galvanizing moment brought on by intense upheaval or emotional experience — coming face-to-face with our own vulnerabilities or the precariousness of life. Or it’s simply a moment of pure wonder at the beauty all around us, every day.