Iranian-Canadian multi-genre author Hollay Ghadery interviews award-winning writer Tracy Wai de Boer about her mesmerizing new poetry collection Nostos (Palimpsest Press, 2025).
Taking its title from Ancient Greek, Tracy Wai de Boer’s Nostos is a hero’s journey rooted in the quest for selfhood from elemental beginnings to an unknowable end. “Nostos” translates to homecoming and is one of the root words of nostalgia; the other, “algos,” means pain, making nostalgia a painful return home. This etymology acts as guide for de Boer’s “i” when she imagines homecoming as less a moment of arrival and more about desire to move through pain and mystery in the formation of self. Nostos is an essential debut from one of Canada’s fastest rising poets.
Let’s start by talking about the title of your collection. There are many ideal, single-word jewels of titles in the book so I wanted to know the process of arriving at Nostos for the title to represent all the poems.
Ah, I appreciate that!
I am often curious about the plain meanings of words – that is, stripped of all value, judgement, or context.
I’ve been confused by the world of “Other People” to some degree my whole life. In the world of Other People, things can feel so charged and full of value judgements (both positive and negative). In this confusion, I can lose the thread of what things really mean, separate from all that noise. Coming back to a word’s origin or definition helps ground me in some way. I often want to know: What does something mean when it is free from external judgement or even context? Just the word on its own?
My partner and I talk about words frequently. He is well-versed in Latin and Ancient Greek, so language is something we have frequent meandering discussions on. (It’s also very handy anytime I want to quickly pull up an etymology.) On that note, the origin of the word “nostalgia” came early in the formation of this book. Nostos – meaning homecoming, algos, meaning pain, makes “nostalgia” a painful homecoming, or painful return home. Nostalgia (its sweetness, its painfulness, its ultimate helplessness and grief) were things I was moving through during the formation of this work, and I think that shows in many of the poems.
“Nostos” as a larger concept is represented in The Odyssey, with Odysseus’s long journey home. The idea is that the journey fundamentally changes–even elevates—us, and so when we arrive, we do not arrive as the same person as when we left. This idea seems to represent much of what is happening in the collection, through the journey of “i” becoming “I.”
Being inside your poems felt like being inside a lung. There’s the expansion. There’s a compression. The poem “Pinhole” really sums up this sensation, but it is something I experienced throughout your collection. Tell me about how your poetry holds space for opposing forces.
Thank you for this incredibly thoughtful and generous interpretation.
I love this question because you’ve touched on something that occupies a significant piece of my mind’s real estate.
To me, being human is ultimately about holding space for opposing forces: we’re so often experiencing things in tension with one another. We are both animal and divine. Our physical bodies are so resilient but also so fragile. Love can be at once incredibly painful and joyous. Death is certain but also nonsensical when we experience it close to us. Making friends with paradox and holding space for opposing forces seems to be a major part of what it means to be human.
Poetry is a playground for me – it allows me to play with the heavy stuff or silly stuff of living and being alive. In that playground, I can explore these ideas in a space that is somewhat formless, judgment-free, and fun.
From your poem, “Lullaby”:
“Leave the lights low
sing to me that old tune
the one my mother used to sing
of picking tea leaves
from Chinese hillside
in a language i don’t speak
but understand the meaning of.”
I was immediately grabbed by this poem which ended with these lines—there’s such urgency and even violence in the poem, and a need for belonging and safety. I am biracial and I don’t fluently speak the language of my father, but whenever I hear it, I feel home. But—in returning to that theme of opposing forces—I can also feel peripheral threat of being pushed out. I was wondering if you would speak to the search for belonging and wanting in your work, which is a recurring theme.
I relate to that peripheral threat of being pushed out. I’m also biracial and the funny thing about that experience is you don’t really ever feel you belong with either side of your family. When I was younger, I felt this more acutely. It felt pressing and concerning. I felt I had to stand up for my racial identity constantly. As I’ve gotten older, it feels like less of a thing for me. Or rather, maybe I’ve grown around it. There are many ways I don’t fit cleanly into one group or category – just like none of us really do – and so the idea of “belonging” for me has become a much broader, messier concept, and I’m okay with that.
The experience of wanting is certainly a long-running theme in my life. I wouldn’t say this is a shallow sense of wanting. It’s a deep kind – one that makes me want to grab the world with both hands and pull it in close. Related to having a lot of mental activity, I’ve always been a person with a powerful sense of want and desire. I’m hungry for life and all that comes with it. “Muchness,” and “Desire is a Four-Letter Word,” poems in the collection, touch on these feelings directly. Sometimes this deep sense of want feels gnawing and crazy-making, like a greediness. Other times it makes me feel alive and a part of it all – it’s a call that drives me forward.
I loved your poems on teeth and baleen. Talk to me about the nidus of these poems.
It’s funny. Only through editing did I realize how much teeth featured throughout the book.
Teeth are powerful symbols! Many people (including myself) have recurring nightmares about teeth breaking or shattering in their mouths and there’s been plenty of cultural discussion about what this means or how it relates to periods of anxiety or stress. Teeth are also weird! They’re exposed bones. We use them all the time. They can nourish – by breaking food into smaller pieces, but they can also harm – through biting and breaking skin. They’re also used in communication: animals bare their teeth as a warning, we smile.
With Nostos being about growing up and leaving certain things behind, it seems teeth may be an apt metaphor. Teething is painful, but through the process we gain the ability to take part in eating solid food. We lose our baby teeth as we grow older. We have wisdom teeth pulled as we enter adulthood (I never did, because I’m stubborn). Teeth are somewhat universal, but also very animal.
The whale as a symbol of presence and power stuck with me throughout the writing of Nostos. Baleen is interesting, because it isn’t exactly teeth – it’s made of the same material as our hair and fingernails. It’s incredibly strong but also very flexible. It allows whales to feed themselves by separating their food from the water that surrounds them. Baleen also represents two things that might seem at odds – strength and flexibility – but are made even more powerful when paired together.
What’s your advice on distilling poems down to their pearliest bits?
This is such a great question.
I write poems quickly – I just try to get them down however, whenever, wherever they come out. It’s like I can hear them happening and then I think, “Oh shit! It’s happening!” And I grab whatever I can and just get it all down. If I’m lying in bed and one comes to me and I don’t write it down, I know it’s lost forever.
Once a poem has landed somewhere (in my Notes app, on my computer, in a notebook, on a scrap of paper), I let it sit for some amount of time (months, years) before I revisit them.
The good bits sometimes jump out at me. Sometimes it’s immediately clear like that. Other times, I have to dig for those pearly bits. And if I have to dig, then I have to be honest with myself in order to excavate that pearl: What am I really trying to say and what’s the truest way I can say it? What is this really about for me? What if I put aside any kind of value judgment or human assessment and just received this idea or feeling in its purest form? And that’s where it is – glittering in the dirt.
And then sometimes you have to throw the whole thing out.
And that’s okay too.
TRACY WAI de BOER is an award-winning writer, poet, and multidisciplinary artist. She co-authored Impact: Women Writing After Concussion which won the Book Publishers of Alberta Best Non-Fiction Award and was named one of CBC’s Best Non-Fiction Books of 2021. Her chapbook, maybe, basically, was published with Anstruther Press in 2020. Tracy was a resident at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2017, 2023) and her work has been featured internationally in outlets including Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Catapult, Plenitude Magazine, Ricepaper Magazine, G U E S T, canthius, Prude Magazine, Petal Projections, and Unearthed Online Literary Journal. Nostos is Tracy’s first full-length poetry collection.
HOLLAY GHADERY is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.