What is Broken Binds Us

What is Broken Binds Us is a collection of poems of the disruptions and emotional tremors that shape us: enslaved families broken and dispersed, histories hidden, addiction and estrangement, and the shocks of bodily trauma.

What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care.

In seven sections, Daniel braids the stories of empire, personal traumas, addiction and family estrangement, shifting emergencies, and the wisdom of elders and the natural world. Lessons in Emergency Preparedness traces accident, injury and recovery, facing the trauma of a sudden loss of physical competence through the metaphorical and literal breaks of a shattered body and the slow movement towards mending. When the Tributaries Ran Rich unravels empire and a five-century narrative of hard-working immigrants with the discovery of enslavement in family records, forcing a deep reconsideration of the truth of the past. Episodic Tremor & Slip speaks of the tectonic shifts in family life that occur when facing substance abuse, addiction, and mental health struggles, of the pain of estrangement and the love that continues. In the Family Name is a reflection on time, on people, and on the natural world that revisits and turns over all that came before, exploring it from new angles.

Lorne Daniel writes with calm, conversational assurance. These poems are accessible and evocative, speaking from their specificity to the many people who have faced injury, estrangement, struggle, and pain, and must carry it—and carry on.

Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has publsihed four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC.

Poems in What is Broken Binds Us confront readers with the complexities of life and loss with a raw honesty and lyrical beauty. Through poignant moments—an infant’s cooing, a small flower growing in a cracked wall—the speaker notes the emotional tremors that shape us, questioning the nature of happiness, wholeness and survival. Reflective of family, ancestry, and the legacies of the past, these poems reveal the gap between hope and reality. Amidst the wreckage, this collection makes space for wonder and the possibility of starting anew. A deeply moving meditation on resilience, it asks readers to reflect on their own transformations and the quiet miracles that sustain us.

—Puneet Dutt, author of The Better Monsters

I’ve followed Lorne Daniel’s work for a lifetime. He hails from the land of Robert Kroetsch, the long line, the long poem and the long vista. He is the trusted friend with a wise and gentle hand on the wheel, always listening, a sure eye on the horizon, through windstorm or whiteout, he’s there. And his latest collection of poetry, What is Broken Binds Us, shows why Daniel is a poet we can trust.

—Bruce Hunter, author of Galestro

Lorne Daniel’s What is Broken Binds Us is a meditation on unexpected crises and the resilience it takes to endure. With language that ranges from stark and precise to lyrical and expansive, Daniel explores the intimate moments where things break down—be it the body, relationships, or the natural world. His poems shift from the personal, like the speaker’s desire to share something hopeful with his late mother, to the universal, where we sing vibratos of light and are reminded that only what is unnamed remains wild. With deep emotional resonance, this collection pulses with vulnerability, rawness, and story, inviting you to reflect on your own unexpected emergencies. What is Broken Binds Us are powerful poems that needed to be written, and I am grateful that Daniel did.

—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides

Lorne Daniel’s most recent book of poems opens with such taut language and metaphor, I instantly and physically readied for the wrong emergencies. But each seemed bad, but could be worse, the big moment in “the little emergency averted.” Each section shifted to new and faulty preparation for what might come or has already happened. Ongoing climate change, intergenerational family history in colonization, settler life and enslavement, as well as the more immediate family story. Poem by poem, tension and anticipation of tension drives and is driven by the intensity of language and image. The art here is in how the deeply personal and painful is held, almost constrained, within the container of sharp exact language and metaphor; like the Mariana Trench, with its profound depths, as well as its potential to shift.

—Yvonne Blomer, author of Death of Persephone