Magnetic Equator By Kaie Kellough McClelland & Stewart, 104 pages, $19.95

Just as the equator divides the world into northern and southern hemispheres, so the poems in Kaie Kellough’s third collection are split between Canada and South America. They also shift between the intimate and the panoramic. The Montreal poet grapples with identity and belonging in these dense, free-flowing meditations. “I don’t know/how not to be multiple,” he writes, “descended, in part, from those who were sold…descended, in part, from those who bought and owned others.” Kellough ponders what he calls “my dissonance,” looking back on his teenage years in a Calgary suburb (“i’d like to erase the syntax i grew up in,” he writes); in a visit to lush, tropical Guyana (his mother’s native country) he’s aware of “a strange culture of concrete and wires/ colonizing my gray matter.”

Elsewhere, Kellough refers to the weight of the past carried by asylum seekers as “ghost cargo.” He bears witness to his own “ghost cargo” in these powerful poems.