Shadow Price
by Farah Ghafoor
House of Anansi Press
128 pages
$23
Ecopoetry is a field that often explores the boundaries of human, animal, and machine. Shadow Price, the debut collection from Farah Ghafoor, presents a groundbreaking take on ecopoetry, exploring these boundaries while underscoring the most urgent matters of our time. Ghafoor’s innovation is apparent from the very beginning, with the collection’s title coming from an economic concept describing “the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists.” While this might initially seem like an unlikely source of inspiration, the collection positions its interrogation of the climate crisis and capitalism within the very systems that have given rise to these global challenges.
Ghafoor situates these challenges in a world that is deeply alive, populating her poems with unexpected and compelling language where inanimate objects are awake, animated, and agentic beings. In “The Last Poet in the World,” Ghafoor describes “machines [that] stare with their long eyes” and, in the very same line, an “iceberg [that] floats into a dreamless coma.” Both machine and iceberg are living beings, connected to the web of life and capital and present in the crisis of climate collapse.
Equally compelling are the human characters in these poems, who are likewise confronting the existential dilemmas stemming from climate change, colonialism, and the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation. These struggles are reflected in how they navigate their lives, as in poems where their “fevers broke like heat records” and “money ate through our varnished lives / like termites.” These similes underscore the connections between people and the systems they encounter, emphasizing a time where all beings, both animate and inanimate, are deeply connected and therefore exposed to the same emergent—and urgent—precarity.
These connections also extend to Shadow Price’s concern with time. For Ghafoor, the past, present, and future are complicated by how humans conceive of them; in two different poems, she reflects that “the future is a tightrope” and “the past is a profitable industry / a destination that will educate you on its edges.” The institutionalization and industrialization of time are recurring topics in the collection, and are most apparent in poems about museums, fossils, and extinction. Both “Natural History Museum” and “The Subject” take imperialism to task by questioning how the past is organized and curated for the public, creating compelling tensions between time as a subject and time as an object.
The poems also ground time in the same animism and subjugation encountered by the human, animal, and natural worlds. In “The Last Poet in the World,” Ghafoor writes that: “[w]ith precision you can create time / call it indoors with its soaked fur and disinterested gaze / and kill it, too.” Within these natural and unnatural systems, even time can become something that is domesticated, trapped, and killed.
A compelling collection of poetry that, at times, converges into documentary, the poems of Shadow Price are an exhortation, compelling the reader to move out of the default state of complicity and into a deeper interrogation. The at-times brutal imagery and facts included within this collection create a necessarily jarring effect, compelling the reader to bear witness and calling them to action. The result is poetry that manages, at the same time, to show us a world that is beautiful and, above all, inherently valuable.
