Alex Leslie’s manuscript for The things I heard about you was a finalist for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Its innovation draws inspiration from the late John Thompson, a poet with a cult following in Canadian letters. “I know how small a poem can be,” Thompson wrote. Using this line as a springboard, Leslie whittles down 13 poems in as many as four revisions apiece, in each case ending up with one single line.

Unlike Thompson’s scalpel-sharp ghazals, however, Leslie has drafted a series of purposely unwieldy prose poems that lend themselves to pruning. For example, in “Debris for Children,” Leslie writes, “Nobody bags the debris, bits float on years, lichen grows over the pack of smokes.” This reduces to, “Lichen, with its exacting noose.”

We can debate which version is better – and one supposes this is the point, calling into question the inequitable relationship between writers and readers. Leslie’s construct presumes that, as in math, showing your work is somehow more democratic than pretending, à la Beyoncé, that the poem “woke up like this.”

To some extent, readers expect to trust – or reject – the judgment of authors (and editors) to make sound decisions in shaping an artistic work. Of course, choosing not to make these decisions is also a choice, and a seductive one. However, this kind of hedging makes Leslie’s volume feel as though she overwrote – both in terms of volume and quality – in order to have material available to cut. I kept wishing these poems did the inverse of what they attempt: I wish they began small, over-edited, tense, and allowed us to see them expand, assured of their own qualities, and confident in their right to occupy space.