Book Description
A Carol Shields Prize winner for her collection of fictions Code Noir, Canisia Lubrin now brings readers a long-form poetic tribute to her mother, praised by Dionne Brand as “incandescent”
In this stunning new poem, Canisia Lubrin’s signature epic vision is distilled into a elegy to her mother, along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment that belongs as much to history as to today. Her lucid attention to what might be the oldest metaphor for grief is drawn from the searing gravity and resonance of the modern poet’s decisive, interior, and inexpressible meditation on love, time, and loss in the excesses of life’s ambitions.
woman from fine-print time, disclose to the world:
the forecast of our noontime births outdoors; how I distrust
every form of authority, chiefly my own astonishment
this poisoned wish is why I love, I bow to deserts,
these claychildren of forests everywhere
I love the rain, this is no secret, I love the solar wind;
hold their elliptical life in the wasteland of our third mouths
where flowers are invisible and bones are sanded and amusing,
and every heliopause cloud senses our head, how we astonish
our memories vining where no shade is enough,
since many who’ll feed me will refuse me their names,
and good, who knows what bargains I would make
with their meanings . . .
Praise For This Book
"Lubrin’s fifth book, her fourth work of poetry, is a wonder. Elegy, lyric, and meditation . . . The grief and lyricism in the poem will be quickly recognized by readers, but there is also something larger that is more difficult to articulate with precision but which creates anticipation for each next line. Ultimately, the poet renders time atmospheric, with interiors and exteriors, personal and political, overlapping as Lubrin observes 'how we are astonished.'” —Booklist“How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.” —Dionne Brand
