The Waking Glacier

A High Arctic Lyric

by Dianne Chisholm

Published by: University of Alberta Press

Series: Wayfarer 

128 pages; 6" x 9"

Sales Date: 2026-09-08

The Waking Glacier is a compelling, if unsettling, work of literary travel that embarks on an Arctic sea voyage as a dawning, existential immersion in the larger-than-human world. Mixing poetic reflection, ecological inquiry, and episodic memory, Dianne Chisholm documents her queer obsession with the ice. This is not a chronicle of heroic adventuring, but a serial passage of haunting attunement. Glaciers are rendered animate, volatile beings—their sublime spectacle inseparable from the melancholic soundscape of their groans, wails, and wakes of collapse under forces of planetary warming. The text itself is a crystallizing sensorium, seamlessly synthesizing expedition journal, polar exploration, revisionary history, and innovative prose poetry. With lyrical acuity and philosophical depth, Chisholm’s work serves as a powerful meditation on perception, loss, and the role of art in witnessing climate change. The Waking Glacier will resonate with readers of Juliana Spahr, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Macfarlane and Ellen Meloy, as well as scholars in environmental humanities and decolonial studies.

“A strikingly original and deeply immersive meditation on Arctic exploration, climate change, and the evolving meanings of place in a rapidly warming world.” Lisa E. Bloom, Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics

“With awe and reverence for the natural environments of the north, Dianne Chisholm explores concerns with land, environment, climate change, creativity, and gender through a High Arctic expedition to Svalbard, Norway.” Kit Dobson, Field Notes on Listening

"In rich crevasses of words, and the lush hush of photographs, Dianne Chisholm travels north, far north, to be alive and attued to the huge presence of remote Norwegian glaciers. She queries their mysterious names and origins, and addresses them directly at times, as if recognizing, in them, their own sentience. Reading her, we awaken to a habitation with a non-human other that astounds." Erin Moure, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry