Goose

Melanie Dennis Unrau is a poet, editor, scholar, and climate organizer of mixed European ancestry from Winnipeg, Manitoba, traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anishininewuk, Dakota Oyate, and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Red River Métis. She is the author of the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024) and the poetry collection Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013). A former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine, Melanie also co-edited I’ll Get Right on It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Fernwood, 2025).

"Playful, haunting, and fiercely intelligent, Goose is a poetic act of reclamation."—Open Book"Recontextualizing and reinterpreting Ells’s archive, Goose flies in the face of settler-colonial narratives, giving voice to the land and labourers Ells exploited in his work and writing."—Prairie Books Now"Goose is a cheeky, sharp-witted irreverent act of literary criticism."—CBC Books"The hand-traced, layered poems in Melanie Dennis Unrau’s latest collection, Goose, stalk and dance across the page... These poems are an angry, funny, generous intervention into the national mythology."—Winnipeg Free Press"A unique piece of art that invites the reader to hold space for those who have been here since time immemorial."—The Seaboard Review"Goose is a medium through which we can look at what discourse makes disappear... Unrau’s practice gives us something akin to cleaning pages and recycling the materials that can still be of use, to help rid us of what has purposely been placed in the way of our imagination."—The Temz Review"In Goose, Unrau uses Ells’ own language to reveal the erasure inherent to his poetics. Working with what the archive conceals, Unrau offers a different call for us to heed: to recognize the essential harm of a way of life dependent on fossil fuels and extraction, or else become geese, diving into the oil fields, trapped in its tailings."—The Ex-Puritan"Visually expansive, with a delightful use of image and space."—rob mclennan"Goose is a masterful work of reinterpretation, revealing brilliant strands of critique and resistance within the romanticized poems and drawings of the self-styled 'father of the tar sands.' Language, image, land and labouring bodies break free of Sidney Ells’s narrow preconceptions here, unravelling the colonial logic of extractive industry and presenting instead a vibrant, nuanced way of understanding energy and belonging."—Warren Cariou, author of Lake of the Prairies"Honk if you’re ready to ruffle the colonial archive! Goose is one of those rare and wonderful works that just sits beautifully, irreverently, and wholly in its hybridity, its experimentation, and its genre-bending and never once tries to justify itself. In this sharp, witty, funny, and deeply political collection, Melanie Dennis Unrau raises a delicately inked middle finger to extractivist nostalgia. Tracing and transforming the settler boosterism of Sidney Clarke Ells, she reclaims the page with each gestural mark and cheeky erasure. The result is, like every goose, fierce, silly, and totally ungovernable."—Dani Spinosa, author of OO: Typewriter Poems"Goose is far more than experimental poetry: it is call and response, disintegration and repair. These poems cast a long, hard look at S.C. Ells’s contributions, as 'the father of the tar sands,' to the colonial prosperity of Alberta and the ecological devastation that followed in his and others’ footsteps. The collection speaks from within the stacks of the archives and the living tissue of community stories; ebullient and interrogatory, these poems sound their presence as clearly as the geese."—Jenna Butler, author of Revery: A Year of Bees