On the Way to Kluusms
by Lorin Medley
On the Way to Kluusms by Lorin Medley is a haunting, lyrical, limited-edition chapbook from the Watershed Press series, rooted in the Cascadian bioregion. Drawing from her experience as a trauma counselor and RMT, Medley offers a visceral poetics of embodiment, ancestral memory, and ecological interconnection. Her journey through Vancouver Island toward the Nass River — Kluusms in Sm'algyax — is both physical and metaphysical, where the land speaks and the poet listens. Marmots, sea wolves, tides, and histories converge in this decolonial, place-based poetry that blurs human and more-than-human boundaries. This limited-edition, hand-stitched volume embodies Cascadia’s wild spirit and interwoven stories.
Tuning in, intuiting. Medley draws upon skills learned in her work as a trauma counselor and before that as a registered massage therapist. Embedded in the history, tides, and tensions of the Cascadia bioregion she finds a particular kind of music.
What I know is the language
of bodies and how we inhabit them
—Lorin Medley
Hand-stitched chapbook/limited edition of 100 signed copies
Date of Publication: August 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9991654-1-1
Pages: 36
Size: 5.5” x 8.5”
Stonehenge cover with deckled edge
Terra Cotta flysheets
Price: $25.00 (price includes shipping in the Continental USA)
Excerpt
an excerpt from "Kus-kus-sum"
1. Field’s sawmill
ghost bodies
on platforms in trees
retaining walls at the river’s edge
log booms tugged in the memory waters
past Hollyhock Marsh upriver to the mill
Ross and Marty on the green chain
yellow cedar 4 x 4s
treble beep of forklifts front-end loaders
ambient bandsaw’s bite and zing
love it or hate it
concedes a waitress serving honey buns
across the river from the lumber yard
downstream bones in the midden
winged chevron of fish traps
storied tumble of salmon
estuary the tidal mouth of a large river
mud mouth salt chew.
About Lorin Medley
Lorin Medley is a counsellor and writer from Comox, BC published in Drift: Poems and Poets from the Comox Valley, Sweetwater: Poems for the Watersheds, Refugium: Poems for the Pacific, The New Quarterly magazine, subTerrain, The Puritan, Many Gendered Mothers, and Portal. She won the 2014 Islands Short Fiction Contest, Aislinn Hunter's 2015 Books Matter poetry prize and was long listed for the 2016 Prism International Poetry Contest.