Crushed Wild Mint
by Jess Housty
Nightwood Editions
121 pages
$20
Crushed Wild Mint is a volume of poetry about inheritance. Not just the inheritance of blood, traditions, values, and skills allocated by older relatives, but also the inheritance of the land. Jess Housty’s work is a humble yet confident demonstration of their merits as a creative and as an herbalist with outstanding respect for their crafts. Poetry is their art, but so is what they do with herbs that they gather, smell, brew, but never claim to own outright.
Housty, a community leader of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation, is very much connected to their people and their surroundings. Crushed Wild Mint, their first traditionally published work, is a romantic array of freestyle poems that marries their cultural knowledge to their expertise of medicinal plants. Their own long-term relationship to their vocations is amicable. They write as someone who understands fully that the earth is the host, and they are the guest, and they have only been given permission to devotedly tend to it and use what it grows. It was the same for their ancestors, from whom they learned their obligations, and they will not contest it: “They prayed over the licorice fern, / the yew and the blisters of conifer sap; / they prayed over the cedar; / and now the descendants of those plant kin / carry those prayers forward to you.”
The tone of Housty’s poems is gentle, serene, and nostalgic, evoking within the reader welcome memories such as forest hikes, mountain climbs, gathering around campfires, and waiting out snowstorms. However, Housty doesn’t leave out the gritty bits of living off the land and constructs their own eloquent ways of metaphorizing hunting creatures of the woods and preserving their bones for their precious marrow. By using a second person narration style, beseeching both their honoured loved ones and audience, Housty allows the reader to participate directly, sometimes as part of natural cycles: “Of course, my shining girl, you are not a deer, / and it is not time for you to reciprocate the medicines / by feeding what will heal babies not yet born.”
Housty also doesn’t hesitate to constantly remind readers that nature can be harsh, unpredictable, and overwhelming with its unbreachable power. Throughout Crushed Wild Mint, readers will be made to remember that one’s time on earth is borrowed, along with the ingredients taken from the earth for nourishment and healing. Time, and resources, should always be handled with tender care.
