My Mother Joins the Resistance by Richard Harrison

Review by Ken Wilson

Ken Wilson is a book reviewer and author of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road (University of Regina Press, 2025). His second book, Walking Well, will appear in 2026. Read his writing at Readingandwalking.com. Ken is a settler who grew up in the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario. He lives on Treaty 4 territory in oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan), where he is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. Read Ken's author Q&A, or listen to his audio essay about writing Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road.

Find the publisher's description of My Mother Joins the Resistance by Richard Harrison (Wolsak and Wynn, 2026; $20) beneath Ken's review.

My Mother Joins the Resistance by Richard Harrison

My Mother Joins the Resistance, by Richard Harrison

Richard Harrison’s latest book of poetry, My Mother Joins the Resistance, is suffused

with grief. That’s not surprising, since at least half of the poems included here reflect on the death of his mother, Doreen. After she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Doreen elected to go through medical assistance in dying (MAID) shortly after that practice became legal in Canada. Along with her death, Harrison grieves the sexual abuse his mother survived as a child and the effect of that trauma on her life. The rest of the book’s poems mourn other losses: the death of his late father, the ravages of climate change, a tree cut down in his neighbour’s yard, abandoned friendships, his own retirement. Grief, is central here, yes, but so is anger (when his mother says in the title poem that the hurricane that’s likely to hit Washington, D.C. after her death that afternoon will be her spirit “pissing on Trump”), and love, since the grief and anger are how we express love when its object is gone, and life, since despite all of these losses, something still remains.

Poems stitched together through quotation

I loved the way these poems have been stitched together through quotation. For

instance, the title of “The End of the Town,” which relates the impact of his mother’s abuse (mental illness, violence), quotes a phrase from A.A. Milne’s “Disobedience” that she read to him when he three years old. Such quotation is reinforced by repeated images—of apprehending a celestial event through its reflection on the earth (the aurora borealis, a solar eclipse), of trees, of smoke, of God—and words. Other quotations, like the example from Milne, link these poems to the work of other poets. The canon of English literature is throughout this book: Harrison reads “Ode to a Nightingale” to his mother on her deathbed; one of his most valued possessions is her calligraphic rendering of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “wet with forever and grace.” I loved the way “The Kingfisher” calls to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” both by direct allusion and by repeating key words borrowed from that poem (“ploughing,” “shining,” “ember”), as a way of thinking about a radically different bird from Hopkins’s kestrel. Perhaps those references are the result of a career teaching literature in universities, but the presence of other poets here (Michael Dennis, Beau Beausoleil, and David Cavanagh make appearances) suggest that Harrison just loves poetry, no matter who its authors might be.

These poems are full of surprises, as all good poems are. During his father’s cancer therapy, for instance, we’re told that “his skin became to radiation / like a cactus to the sun.” That comparison stopped me, left me wondering what it means. So did the odd syntax in “When We Were Very and I Was Young,” which is repeated in that poem’s last lines. When we were very what? I asked myself. Where’s the noun? I would need to spend more time with these poems, trying to tease out their significance, but I would also be happy to allow such moments to remain strange. After all, the experiences Harrison writes about—violence, illness, our deliberate decision to set our planet aflame—are strange, so why shouldn’t his language, his metaphors, follow their example?

Years ago, I received Harrison’s Governor General’s Award-winning book On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood as a gift. I never opened it. I don’t know why. It’s on a shelf in our basement. Now, though, after finishing My Mother Joins the Resistance, I am inspired to dig it out and start reading.

Description of My Mother Joins the Resistance by Richard Harrison (Woolsak and Wynn, 2026, $20)

All there is, is light and darkness and wonder.And in that moment, there is no difference, either,between love and the memory of love. – “Up Above the World”

My Mother Joins the Resistance by Richard Harrison is a companion to his Governor General Award–winning collection On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. In My Mother Joins the Resistance, Harrison considers his mother’s life – from her time as a child during WWII’s Operation Pied Piper, up until its end, in 2017, when terminally ill with cancer, she chose MAiD – with elegant, deeply felt poetry. These are beautiful poems, ones that piece together a person, a life and a family over generations. These are poems that examine the wounds passed down through a family, alongside the love, and see the echoes of both – the wounds and the love – in the world around us.

“I was taken by a riptide, allowed my body to be still, held my breath so I wouldn’t drown. Then a tsunami slammed me against the shore and I gulped with pain. A sudden awareness, a philosophical, spiritual awakening. This is Richard’s story, sorrow, grief, the openness to truth. I love when poetry touches me to the core. This is what makes an entry to the soul. Read it until the pain subsides. And cry as the water heals you.” – Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer, Canada’s Ninth Parliamentary Poet Laureate. My Mother Joins the Resistance by Richard Harrison is available from Wolsak and Wynn and all good bookstores.