The Selkie

Morgan Võ’s debut poetry collection, The Selkie, explores the disappearance and displacement both of small commercial enterprises in a capitalist economy and of the people who earn their living from these businesses. Võ considers, in particular, the impact of the food industry on the environment, and our relationship to food as an object of consumption:

a whole batch arrives
skinny
dead
unappealing
cheap

one day they will be
fat
fresh
delectable
and worthy
of no
small space

The book comprises three parts that are linked together by a character called The Monger, who buys and sells fish and whose daily routine is reenacted in language, rhythm, and sounds. Some poems include onomatopoeia—“tsk tsk”; others, repetition:

this one’s salmon
this one’s tuna
this one’s halibut
these are sardines

In one poem, The Monger and his wife engage in a game of questions and answers:

favorite fruit?
persimmons

favorite vegetable?
fresh scapes

favorite dessert?
chocolate cake

What seems like a way to pass time turns into meaningful reflections. The Monger’s wife recalls:

in junior high

we’d meet at a wetlands preserve
and gather soil samples

and samples of the water
to map the acidity

of the area

The poem’s tone becomes more serious as The Monger’s wife goes on to unpack how she translates what she learned into caring for the natural world:

i know i learned all kinds
of important things

when i was in school
but going out there regularly

becoming intimate with that place
and learning what made it unique

understanding what the loss
of that uniqueness would mean

was an early experience of
knowing that learning was

important to me

The lower case “i” throughout this collection challenges an anthropocentric worldview. Võ’s poems also highlight the polyphony of our world, incorporating multiple voices, both human and more than human. These poems playfully engage the reader’s senses and invite us to listen to the world around us.