Ethical Consumption and Irreparable Damage
Review of While Supplies Last by Anita Lahey
By Sara Belmore
Published in 2023, Anita Lahey’s eco-critical poetry collection, While Supplies Lasts, intricately describes and dissects the everyday effects of climate change. This collection is broken into four sections as Lahey imagines and contemplates the pervasive existential worry surrounding the climate crisis through an evocatively bitter tone. The Ontarian poet injects her own personal anecdotes, as well as testimonies from friends, family, neighbours, rumours, and memories, into focused narratives threaded through each piece. She ponders the larger implications of a single person’s significance and ability to create meaningful change, tackling the universal feeling of hopelessness – a consistent theme in her work – through her storytelling.
Drawing on the mundanity of human existence, Lahey begins her collection with a section titled “Seasonal Affective Disorder” and compares the paradoxical nature of humans, and what is human-made, with the natural environment. This section thrives on irony, criticizing humanity’s inaction and inattention to the climate crisis. Lahey highlights paradoxical images of “Hurricane Hazel souvenirs,” and “Slurpee cups / the size of watering cans” that are rolling at the “Todmorden Mills wildflower preserve,” blending the inorganic with the organic. The poet emphasizes the normalization of consumerism and its impact on climate change, willing readers to re-examine their wastefulness and reflect upon the consequences of their deleterious quotidian habits: “We’re each / adding our bit / to the undersea pile-on.” Lahey stresses the routine ignorance of the natural environment and calls attention to an individual’s impact on global warming through her provocative imagery. Employing irony as an effective form of criticism, Lahey mocks the productivity agenda and explains that “Preparation’s a mere / to-do list away.” Through her mesmerizing alliterative prose and formal variety, Lahey accentuates the incompatibility of man and Earth. The author’s repetitive juxtaposition of human-made objects with their ruining of natural environments places a spotlight on our existence: we need the Earth to survive, but the Earth would thrive without humans. Even the titles of each piece humorously represent the contradiction of humanity and nature: “Saskatoon Berries by Value Village” and “Pacific Ocean Tariffs and Tradeoffs.” Completing this section with a final note of negativity (“Defeat”), Lahey surrenders to the predictable nature of humanity’s unwillingness to change.
Lahey follows her contemplation of the interconnectedness of humanity and nature with “Pandemic Traffic Reports,” and depicts the deserted, altered world after the Covid-19 pandemic. The author contrasts her rhythmic, poetic style with more colloquial storytelling as she attempts to put into words the inexplicable feeling of the world’s reopening after its apocalyptic closure. Through her previous use of congeries – such as “Gulls call carnage. Fish / head. Crab carcass” – Lahey piles words together, omitting coordinating conjunctions through the employment of asyndeton, allowing the reader to draw conclusions from what is simultaneously given and left out of the poem. The author’s traffic reports alternatively mimic informal, everyday speech, and many of the poems work within the limits of the first-person perspective. Furthering her exploration of individual experience and day-to-day mundanity, Lahey stretches time through her drawn out poems as she describes instances of commuting by vehicle: “Eastbound 174 is grim— / grim, grim, grim. That / sounds like a street name / in Barrhaven.” Lahey delineates collisions, new warning sign postings, closed roads, and even the terrifying day a sixteen-year-old goes to get their license. While Lahey threads the familiar eco-critical theme throughout her separate sections, she simultaneously merges various perspectives and commonly banal experiences in very few, but impactful words. The poet combines the banalities of life, such as driving a car after the pandemic, and beautifully catastrophic natural disasters to demonstrate the different causes and manifestations of climate change.
In the third and fourth sections, “The Great Fire of Main-à-Dieu,” and “Songs for Main-à-Dieu,” Lahey complements her critical lens with her intensely emotional, personal connection to the 1976 wildfire in the Cape Breton region of Nova Scotia. Lahey elucidates through her informational prefatory statement that her “imaginative texts … draw on deliberate research.” She highlights the stories behind the seventeen family homes that were destroyed – including that of her grandparents and the community’s beloved, century-old church. The poet powerfully dedicates this section to individual experiences with the disastrous effects of the wildfire. Lahey begins the stanzas in her poem, “Bird’s Eye View,” with some of the names of those whose homes crumbled before their eyes, and illustrates the inflated emotion within the community in crisis. The author allows terror, despair, and awe to drive her art, freezing and pressing this small point in time between the pages of her collection. Through the inclusion of the church, Lahey infuses her personal connection to her faith within the poetry. In “Father D’s Trinity Sunday Sermon, Hours Before it Struck,” the author contemplates the unexpectedness of a natural disaster and the unwelcome pain that awaits. Pausing on images of the destruction, Lahey artfully describes “[t]he proud white steeple” that fell so quickly and “fishing boats reduced to skeletons.” The author’s specificity ties each section together to meditate upon the individual, seemingly incomprehensible experiences with climate change, and heighten the significance of smallness, of mundanity.
In one of the final poems in the collection, titled “Tally,” Lahey employs a litany of common, replaceable items and images: the space dedicated to highlighting “pillows,” “shoeboxes with photographs and postcards,” and “pantries stocked with sardines” remind readers of object impermanence and place significance on what it would mean to lose such items. Lahey comments on our need to watch our lives burn, to have everything we have built be destroyed instantaneously, in order to inspire action. What will finally make us recognize the ephemerality of this world?
While Lahey does not follow a common form or convention in her poetry, she finds a link between the smallest of objects and the most widespread experiences, making her collection itself a work of paradox. The author’s malleable poetic style is captivating as she extends the art form to create necessary commentary on common fears and experiences. Lahey’s ability to conjure such acute emotion from a reader speaks to her poetic aptitude. This collection inspires change by placing a spotlight on the individual and the monotonous in human existence. Lahey claims we have forgotten the fragility of natural life beyond ourselves, and her ironic bitterness infiltrates her words as she contemplates whether, rather than put plants in terrariums, “we should all be / tucked into glazed domes, / before things get / out of hand.”
Works Cited
Lahey, Anita. While Supplies Last. Montreal, Véhicule Press, 2023.
Sara Belmore is from Regina, Saskatchewan, and is currently studying English literature with minors in cultural studies, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at McGill University. She is the graphic designer and editor in chief of the Channel Undergraduate Review.
22 August 2025