Electrocutionist

Danielle Hubbard is chief executive officer of the Okanagan Regional Library. Her poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, EVENT, Grain, and The Malahat Review, among other places.

• Dear Lynn Salvo 3Static DomeMinus twenty 9November visit from my parents 11I flirt 13Why I’m afraid my husband will leave me 15Mono 16I place a classified ad in The Sun 18A thousand shivering water striders 20Neal Carson 22Swan dive 24My lover tells me about car theft while I eat blueberries 26Why I’m grateful my lover smokes 28Pulling up clover by the handful 30Fact-checking with Zoe Carson 32Charlene 34Why I sulk for the colour pink 36Tripartite and trying 38Why I’m afraid to end this affair 40Driving home 42Circuit BreakerFrom Bromley Rock 47The children we won’t have 48To give some context 49Phoning Natalie 51How my life compares to that of Bonnie Parker 53Duo or die 55Bird/sanctuary 57Zoe Carson 59Homes and okonomiyaki 61Why I long for the colour beige 63Jugglery 65The ringmaster 67Years before marriage 70After the affair 72Alternating CurrentTri tri try 77Haro Strait and my hypothetical children 79Thetis Lake 81An evening with Messier 13 83A letter to my future ex-husband 85Ritika 87A tiny figure against the glare 88Summer Saturdays 90Gordon Head Pool 92My sister Luna 94Whiskey jacks are birds with the wingbeats of guilt 96Double solitaire 98Why my mom loves reusable bags 100Marilyn 103Discussing alternating current with my father the electrical engineer 105Triple solitaire 107Under glass 108My sister Rochelle 110Snapping dragons 112Yellowjackets 113Photo album of the long-distance runner 115The week Mom dies 117Bob Lucy’s apple juice 119Why the colour green is my doppelgänger 120Dear Mom 122Notes and acknowledgments 125

“Energy in these poems is language, sound, and cadence; the physicality of this speaker pounds through the poems. The mother’s cancer and death paves and weaves between the narrator’s marriage and affair. Life’s elliptical dissatisfaction, an X-acto knife, and grief the muscled organ and bone, the force of the body running. Which ecstasy or tragedy can we stick a pin in? Who will squirm? The speaker, the reader, or the poems themselves.” - Yvonne Blomer, author of Death of Persephone: A Murder “Line after line in this book I read out loud, letting Hubbard’s words shape my voice: ‘Cellophane, Saran Wrap, monosodium glutamate. / I munch the inside of my cheek. / I mount the metaphorical monorail. I slather / salt on my omelet. // Monotremes are the last / egg-laying mammals. Whatever.’ This book is a song to the pleasures and dangers of life, words, the mortal body and all its languages. And because of that, it is also an elegy for the death of loved ones and a hymn to their memory.” - Richard Harrison, Mount Royal University “A tiny fuse burns inside these poems, a self set like a spark along exposed wire. Hubbard tests the capacity of desire, identity, and fidelity in a world made of yolk with all the appliances set on high. Here is the heart travelling on an alternating current, staying the course between domesticity and detonation. Hubbard shows us language as pure conduction.” - Jennifer Still, author of Comma and the 2025–26 Winnipeg Poet Laureate