By Drew Lavigne, Frye Correspondent
Book reviewed: Shadow Price by Farah Ghafoor (House of Anansi Press, 2025)
In her striking debut collection, Shadow Price, Farah Ghafoor writes about a world where things are falling apart, where, as Yeats says, “the centre cannot hold.” Across the book’s central sequence, titled “The Plot,” she uses trees as an extended metaphor for colonialism and environmental collapse, and while writing about clearcutting invokes Yeats directly, “Then all at once, your mind is sheared flat and smooth as a stone. A gyre / thumbed open for the sky, the past swirling into the future.” (59)
The book moves fluidly between states: human, animal, mineral. At one moment we are grounded in the present, at another dispersed into the deep past or speculative future ravaged by industrial violence. These are poems where nothing stays fixed. Time folds. Perspective shifts. Everything is happening at once. Shadow Price is an expansive bestiary. Spreadsheets and project approvals sit alongside migrating birds, ancient bones, Bigfoot, The Jungle Book, ants, whales, Noah’s Ark. The effect is not randomness but accumulation: it builds a world saturated with meaning and unresolved cost.
Cost: material, emotional, historical, is the book’s central concern. As Ghafoor notes, a “shadow price” is the estimated value of something for which no market price exists. Her poems return continuously to what cannot be easily quantified: the cost of work, of history, of environmental collapse, of simply continuing to live. In the title poem, she writes, “The past brims with dead / things, cooling in the air conditioning. There must be a job to calculate / their price.” (3) The line is witty and devastating. The speaker is an archivist of contemporary anxiety, moving through climate-controlled spaces where history is preserved yet estranged from authentic human connection. The dead accumulate. We catalogue them. We assign value where we can and invent it where we cannot.
An unnerving circular logic of preserving and destroying, valuing and erasing, structures the collection. The past is not the past; it presses continuously into the present. The future, meanwhile, arrives to us already damaged. Across these poems, time does not progress so much as spiral, tightening and loosening in uneven cycles. As history accelerates, it also seems to thin out, as we approach a point of exhaustion.
Ghafoor captures this temporal unease most clearly in a sequence titled “The Last Poet in the World,” where she writes, “Everyone assumed they would live for a long time” (55), the line quietly undoing itself. The assumption of a long life gives way to its opposite: a short one, unfulfilled potential, eventual absorption into the archives or the trash heap. To live now is to anticipate one’s own historicization, to imagine oneself as an artifact.
For all its complexity Shadow Price is remarkably readable. Movement between the mundane and the mythic, the scientific and the poetic, are handled with ease. This is work that trusts the reader, even as it shifts registers quickly and often. Part of what makes this possible is the book’s relationship to a broader shift in contemporary poetry. For much of the late twentieth century, poetry often privileged density and fragmentation over meaning and emotion. The result, at times, was unreadable.
Over the past fifteen years, that has changed. Poets such as Richard Siken and Ocean Vuong, both deeply influenced by Rilke, have reintroduced urgency, vulnerability, and direct address. In their work, the sublime is not distant but a part of ordinary life. Ghafoor’s poems build on this new lineage. In “The Snail,” she writes: “You are going to die … you cannot continue to live like this” (7). The line carries the force of Rilke’s “You must change your life,” from his poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” but their register is distinctly contemporary, tangled in the pressures of late capitalism and environmental crisis. The sublime revelation is not abstract; it is embodied and inescapable.
What distinguishes Shadow Price is the way it uses contemporary romantic intensity while paying close attention to the economic, environmental, and historical systems that shape our lives. The poems are not only concerned with feeling but with the conditions that produce it. Corporate language, bureaucratic structures, and scientific frameworks appear throughout the collection, not as objects of satire but as inescapable parts of lived experience.
The book’s four sections (Time, The Last Poet in the World, The Plot, and The Garden) explore these concerns. “Time” establishes the collection’s ambitious shifting perspectives, searching through human and nonhuman life with equal attention. “The Last Poet in the World” moves into elegy, asking what it means to write at the end of a viable future. “The Plot” situates that crisis within longer histories of colonialism and environmental destruction. By the time we arrive at “The Garden,” the poems return to the personal, not as retreat, but to remind us of what remains. What can still be held, if only briefly, against the ongoing collapse? Even here, the answer is not simple. The emotional register of the book is not despair but a more complicated pairing: empathy and terror. To attend closely to the world is to feel both at once.
In “The Pear,” one of the collection’s most affecting poems, Ghafoor writes:
One day, when we return to the earth,
and our souls are elsewhere
I’ll remember my admission—
that, against the oncoming evening,
I still loved the world. (89)
To love the world is not naïve. It is a position taken with full knowledge of the emotional cost. If Shadow Price asks what everything is worth, it also asks us to see what remains invaluable, what resists calculation even as it slips away.
—Drew Lavigne
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Farah Ghafoor is coming to the Frye Festival!
- FRYE Jam — May 1 · 8 PM
- Beyond the Book — May 2 · 3 PM
Drew Lavigne
Drew Lavigne is the anglophone Poet Laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick. A member of the editorial board at The Fiddlehead and host of the Attic Owl reading series. Recent work has appeared in Valium, Visual Arts News, Tourniquet Magazine, and with Éditions Rhizome. He translated the collection Poems Twofold with Georgette LeBlanc and is the author of Evening Dress with Anstruther Press.
Farah Ghafoor
