Poetry - 30 Days by the Sea

Reading Time: 5 minutes

This page collects all poetry from 30 Days by the Sea, organized by section. The poems range from spare lyric pieces written by the sea to long-form documentary poems about precarious academic labour. They are offered as testimony, as witness, and as a form of knowing that prose alone cannot carry.

Table of Contents

Most Recent Poem

Twenty-Five Years on a One-Year Contract

Section One: From the Shore

Poems written during or about the thirty days in Loreto, Baja California Sur. These pieces attend to the body, the sea, and the slow work of returning to rest.

Section Two: Labour Poems

Poems about precarious academic work, institutional harm, and the cost of contract labour on the body and the self. These poems are testimony from inside nineteen years of sessional teaching.

Section Three: Letters & Memory

Letters written across time — to younger selves, to the self still becoming. These poems hold the relationship between who we were and who we are.

Section Four: The Precariat — A Series

A sequence of twenty-six poems about twenty-five years on a one-year contract. These poems document the texture of sessional academic life: the renewal emails, the empty offices, the students never met in a room, the shoulders that never came down. They are offered as a collective record.

Section Five: Later Life & Caregiving

Poems about aging, caregiving, grief, retirement, and the body in later life. This is the largest sequence in the collection — a record of tending to others and to oneself across the long second half of a life.