Much of the language that makes up Better Nature-the first poetry collection by writer and academic Fenn Stewart-is drawn from a diary that Walt Whitman wrote while travelling through Canada at the end of the nineteenth-century.
But rather than waxing poetic about the untouched Great White North, Stewart inlays found materials (early settler archives, news stories, email spam, fundraising for environmental NGOs, and more) to present a unique view of Canada's "pioneering" attitude towards "wilderness"-one that considers deeper issues of the settler appropriation of Indigenous lands, the notion of terra nullius, and the strategies and techniques used to produce a "better nature" (that is, one that better serves the nation).
