In Scientific Marvel, Chimwemwe Undi, poet, lawyer, and Canada’s 11th Parliamentary Poet Laureate, interrogates the language of care, control, and classification. In an intermingling of poetry and law, Undi dissects the bureaucratic grammars that shape how we understand the body, the migrant, the citizen, and the self. This debut collection holds space for ambiguity and insists on the legitimacy of partial knowledge, emotional inference, and the unsaid.
The book’s title, Scientific Marvel, points to a long history of objectification—the spectacle of the “other” under the microscope. Undi turns that lens outward. Across the collection, she retools the instruments of legal and medical discourse, using poetry to examine their assumptions and expose their limitations. Undi includes a series of striking blackout poems created from foundational Canadian legal rulings, such as R v Grant, Baker v Canada, and Smithers v The Queen, transforming cold, “objective” jurisprudence into haunting artifacts of redacted power. These pieces move beyond mere critique, offering counter-narratives in their own right—and yet, Undi’s lyrical voice is never drowned out by theory. The poems are often tender, grounded in memory, grief, and family. In “Escapology,” she writes:
“The opposite of a boat / is a pine vessel // built to hold a body / keen to sink,” (4).
The metaphor is exquisite in its concision: a coffin as the inverse of passage, the illusion of safety undone. Here, as elsewhere, containment and movement sit uneasily beside each other, and the body remains the site of both escape and erasure.
Undi’s command of tone is particularly compelling in “What Birds Were,” where a seemingly innocuous question—how to explain birds—spirals into a meditation on epistemology:
“Yes, animals, and small, and spined – / no, not unlike a dog, / say dog, but with feathers. // And not always, and not always small. / Oh, a feather is a kind of / leaf. They were good, the birds, yes, // and some of them were kind of bad,” (16).
The poem mimics the halting speech of someone trying to explain a familiar thing to someone who has never encountered it. Its effect is disorienting—what do we mean when we describe something? Who gets to define? Who has been kept from the language of classification?
Perhaps the most emotionally direct poem in this collection is “Phone Home,” in which Undi reflects on both physical and emotional distance:
“There is much // less than a country / between us, / depending on how you draw the country. // There is much less than an ocean. // My favourite colour / has not been blue in years,” (62).
The line about colour is devastating in its understatement—grief refracted through palette. The poem’s speaker is dislocated not just geographically, but emotionally, culturally, and semantically.
Formally, the collection is varied but restrained. The poems often occupy the page with white space that functions as breathing room—an internal echo, perhaps, of the redactions in the blackout poems. Throughout Scientific Marvel, Undi trusts the reader to meet her in ambiguity and confront the limits of both legal reasoning and poetic expression.
Scientific Marvel
by Chimwemwe Undi
House of Anansi Press, Spring 2024, 96 p.p., $21.99
ISBN: 9781487012250
Selena Mercuri (she/her) is a Toronto-based publicist, writer, editor, book reviewer, and social media manager. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto and studied Publishing at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she received the Marsh Jeanneret Memorial Publishing Award. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Literary Review of Canada, Room, The Hart House Review, The Ampersand Review, and The Seaboard Review, among others. She is the recipient of the 2023 Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing and was a finalist in the Hart House Poetry Contest. In Fall 2025, she will begin the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Guelph.