Having worked in a range of investigative fields—including journalism, biology and medicine—Monica Kidd is habitually inquisitive and observant, and her poetry employs this exacting eye to map each new terrain she encounters. While the vantage points, locales and subjects of Chance Encounters with Wild Animals cover a considerable range, the poems find common cause in their spirited testing of what is observed against the native intelligence of the heart.

The poems are gathered into four sections. In ‘Curious’ they depict a speaker working through grief after the death of a parent. The poems of ‘Meeting the Eyes of the World’ are rooted in Kidd’s month-long trip to Antarctica, where she lectured on the natural and cultural history of the polar south. ‘Chance Encounters with Wild Animals’ considers both wilderness-dwelling creatures and the unexpected happenings of our everyday lives. And in ‘Westerlies’ the preoccupation moves toward curiosity, but also absence and longing.

Diverse as they at first seem, a common thread through the poems is Kidd’s interest in various kinds of exile. Whether chosen or imposed, the distance exile places between us and our familiar world inevitably opens possibilities for discovery. Writing with the fresh, direct language of a trained observer, Kidd’s accounts of fascinating, seldom-visited places (like a Gentoo penguin colony) and of historical figures manage to reenergize our curiosity about Antarctic dwellers, adventurers and exotic destinations.

But the animating effect of exile’s distancing extends to seeing the domestic landscape in new ways as well, whether it be encountered in the loss of a family member, in the subtle shifting of a Newfoundland wharf, or in an immigrant’s quest for precisely the right English word for an everyday object. In the tension between familiarization and estrangement, Kidd’s poems often make a home of two places at once without quelling longing.

• Extended radio interview of Gaspereau Press poets Monica Kidd and Linsday Bird (Boom Time, 2019) on CJSW’s Writer’s Block available here: http://bit.ly/2BDIr2a
• Review in Puritan Magazine (February 2020): http://towncrier.puritan-magazine.com/ephemera/review-of-chance-encounters-with-wild-animals-by-monica-kidd-margaryta-golovchenko/
• Review in Alberta Views Magazine (February, 2020): https://albertaviews.ca/chance-encounters-with-wild-animals/

In The Year of Our Beautiful Exile, Monica Kidd observes the ways in which estrangement and loss punctuate our days, but need not always diminish them. Whether she is writing of the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, the displacement of whole communities during the epic flooding of Albertas rivers in 2013, or of the many minor disconnections which occur in the headlong tumble of domestic life and love (where sometimes a smartphone might seem better connected than a spouse, remembers my birthday with a cheery tra-la), Kidd demonstrates a keen eye for the ordinariness of loss, for the way in which the world evolves and adapts in the midst of perpetual change and for the many small moments of human connection that form our lives.

• http://arcpoetry.ca/2016/07/01/traveling-light-monica-kidds-the-year-of-our-beautiful-exile/
• http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2015/07/monica-kidd-year-of-our-beautiful-exile.html
• http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2016/06/the-year-of-our-beautiful-exile-monica.html

Monica Kidd’s Handfuls of Bone takes the reader to the end of the road and back, to outports both literal and figurative, to consider how it is that things somehow hold together. The poems, primarily short, narrative in form and lyric in spirit, are driven by distilled observation and concern themselves with the elemental. These truths find their expression in images of fish drying on Newfoundland clotheslines, of the velvety breath of a newborn baby, of a family’s grief following a sudden death, of Amelia Earhart’s ambition and apprehension, and of motherhood through thick and thin. In confronting uncomfortable moments of loss, want, illness, uncertainty and conflict, Kidd holds a level gaze, avoiding sentimentality and nostalgia. Kidd’s is a poetic which embodies the twin skills of her physicians trainingcool-headed and unblinking observation-based diagnosis combined with compassion, empathy and humanity.

• http://www.malahatreview.ca/reviews/180reviews_walker.html
• http://www.mtls.ca/issue13/writings/reviews/george-elliott-clarke/2/
• http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2012/10/monica-kidd-handfuls-of-bone.html
• http://thechronicleherald.ca/books/98264-poet-marries-precision-compassion
• http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2014/01/handfuls-of-bone-monica-kidd.html

Gathered from its authors wide-ranging experience, Monica Kidd’s debut collection includes local legends and personalities, imagined scenarios based on found photographs, lamentations and confessions of love, lyrical studies of medical anomalies, and landscape portraits. Kidd’s deft imagery and songlike stride render her subjects in striking, familiar gestures that bring the reader alongside her gait and into her minds eye.

The collection opens with a series of poems that tell stories from Kidd’s adopted home in Newfoundland. A drowning, a shipwreck, a community referendum, an abandoned town, a birthday party and other landmark events are relayed in a fashion that relies less on strict narrative account than on associative brush strokes. Infusing her subjects with emblematic strength, Kidd resurrects family tragedies, nights of revelry and community politics in coastal towns.

Found is a collection of photographs purchased from a second-hand store in Winnipeg and paired with Kidd’s imaginative translations of their black-and-white foregrounds into full-colour memories. In one photo a woman surveys a snow-covered field, in another three young girls at the beach squint into the sun. How they got there, where they are going, and the expectations surrounding the captured moment are the poets invention.

Actualities closes with a sequence of Field Notes written during Kidd’s stay at a biology station on Lake Opinicon in southern Ontario. The notes address fields, woods, ponds, night skies and thunder storms, brought to the page with the country lilt and painterly memory that mark Kidd’s work throughout the collection.