Froglet, Compost, Squirrel: Em Dial's In the Key of Decay
A Review by jaclyn desforges
June 28, 2025
In the Key of Decay: Poems. Em Dial. Palimpsest Press. $21.95, 80 pp., ISBN: 978-1-990293-71-9
Over the winter, there are two deaths in my family. My grandmother dies in winter and my partner’s grandfather dies in the same winter. I spend early spring helping to plan funerals and remembering the second grade, when I did a Bristol board project about life cycles. It was the 90s; I cut and pasted with real scissors and glue – egg, tadpole, froglet, frog – and when the snow finally melts, I think about compost. I find a dead sparrow in my yard and scoop it up with a shovel. I look directly at it. I want to dig a grave, but the ground is asphalt. I feel like a fugitive carrying its body to the alley, and I am lucky to have a yard, a shovel, a dead bird. I have the luxury of thinking about birdseed.
Em Dial’s collection In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024) begins with a burial. “I cough up a tonsil stone and the room of my mouth is full / of death.” I teach this poem, “Necropastoral in the Key of Decay”, to a room full of undergraduate students, most of them new to adulthood and new to poetry. I move carefully, watching their eyes, because you can never tell who is new to death and who is not new to death. “I spit it onto my finger and rinse it down the tiny pupil/ of the drain, only witness to the burial besides myself.” We talk about this poem in a class about the movement of poems – how they stretch and wriggle and spiral and turn back on themselves.
I’ve never met Em Dial, but we’ve been circling each other. I won the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award in 2018; they won it in 2020. We’ve both published collections with Palimpsest Press’s Anstruther imprint; we both have poems in the recent Permanent Record anthology, which was edited by Naima Yael Tokunow and published by Nightboat Books. At the end of Dial’s collection I recognize a poem – I realize I chose it as my favourite one summer, reading for a contest. I’m telling you this because there is an intimacy to reading a poem, and an intimacy to reading a poem about death, and an even stranger intimacy to reading a poem about death by a poet who you’ve been circling, while planning two funerals and watching sprouts push themselves up in the garden, out of the soil, near a newly dead bird.
The movement in this particular tonsil poem is one of circling, and when I was my daughter’s age, I went on a lakeside vacation with my mother. Sitting on the deck together, we saw a dead squirrel. A woman rode past us on her bicycle and then she stopped when she saw it, too. She bent down and looked at it, blinked hard, and the squirrel’s eyes flew open. It got up and darted away.
Then my mother said something I can’t remember, and the woman said I would tell you, but I don’t want to scare you.
Tell me, tell me – I’m saying this now, if she can hear me across time, if her powers extend that far – I won’t be scared. I just want to know. “Some memories blur across the amygdala,” Dial writes. And then describes a childhood memory, running over a squirrel with their bike. When the child in the poem looked back, the squirrel “reballooned out of its body to continue running.”
I think often about resurrection, how it lives inside the sun. We buy a lemon tree, we name her Princess Lemon, and she blooms on my daughter’s ninth birthday. Then my daughter turns ten and the tree loses all its leaves.
I want to say we are all implicated in death. I see a spider in the bathroom and I don’t kill it. But there have been other spiders, other bathrooms, and I have killed them. I think about buying land and realize I should also learn to shoot a gun. We stop buying red meat and I spend the winter anemic and weak until I take iron supplements and suddenly I can move again. I officiate the memorial for my partner’s grandparents – for their grandfather, who died in winter, and for their grandmother, too, who died in 2020 when all the funerals were cancelled. There are tissue boxes at the end of every row of comfortable chairs. Grandpa Ken’s CD collection plays over the speakers and there are pictures of the two of them on every surface we can find. Speaking into the microphone, I feel calmer than I expected. It feels good to be near the graves, to look directly at what I’ve spent my life turning away from.
At the interment, my partner’s family places golf balls into the mouth of the grave. My partner’s family places a fresh deck of playing cards into the mouth of the grave. It feels good and awful to see the urns covered in Earth. The memorial plaque goes down and it feels like closure.
Dial’s poem is about decay. I think Dial’s poem is also about resurrection. And of course the lemon tree came back to life – could you tell that, when I first told you about the lemon tree? Did you predict she would become an entirely new tree in the same pot, growing up and out of her old body? Late winter, I hike at Princess Point on weekday mornings with a friend who frets over the lack of snowdrops – “They’re coming,” I say. And they do.
At LitLive on the first night of June, after the funerals are over, I listen to Jessica Bebenek read two poems about the death of her grandfather -- the first written shortly after, focused on the graphic physicality, the horror: “My grampa died gasping, mouth open / to gulp whatever life had yet to bring him.” The second, written later, is shorter: “I loved him. / I was loved / by / him. / It never gets easier than that.”
“I am sometimes the arbiter of death,” Dial writes. “I kept looking at the body and the friend of the body,” Dial writes. I know in the poem that the friend of the body is a literal friend of the body, but meaning stacks, I tell my students – it’s always Yes, and – and I wonder aloud if the friend of the body is the soul. I wonder if my body is a friend to my soul. “And sure,” Dial writes, “it is possible that the earth is just accumulating grief. / That the permafrost is melting from the mantle’s vibrating sorrow.” And the poem ends with the image of the speaker plunging their hands into soil, coming up with fingers tangled in thread.
All this is a long way of saying that In the Key of Decay is a book about decay, and about the way living is dying and dying is living and there are knots to it, the whole business, and we’re all circling some drain together. And what I want to say at the funeral – what I try to say, though in different words – is that living is a lot, too much to hold, too much to look at directly. And what a relief it is to look at it directly. My partner kneels down to place their grandmother’s ashes into the grave, and when my grandmother died – at home, in her own bed, what she wanted, a blessing – I went upstairs to look at her body. So I would know she was gone. So my body would know she was gone.
If I had to give a presentation now about the life cycle of a frog, I would begin with the frog and end with the tadpole. When I think about decay, I try to think about compost. In the final poem of Dial’s book – Against Beauty, my favourite poem in that pile, judging that contest – the final lines are “Here we end with beauty, borders racing / through blood like echoes down a hallway.” My mind’s eye is always scanning for beauty. It makes me feel awake.
Jaclyn Desforges is the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower, winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC's picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. Selected for the New York Times-featured Lunar Codex Project, Danger Flower is now archived on the moon. Jaclyn is also the author of the picture book Why Are You So Quiet? and has received Canada Council for the Arts support for both her forthcoming short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine's Quill, 2026), and her novel-in-progress, Eyelash Person. A Bread Loaf alumna and RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner, Jaclyn teaches creative writing at Wilfrid Laurier University. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario with her partner and daughter.