About this ebook
If you open your mouth, ache. If you don’t open your mouth, swelter. If you open your mouth but hold your breath, ether. If you look for colour, coral and tea leaves. If you follow the moon, wet and concrete. If you cling to the earth, pistol and candy apple. If you give up your garden, maze and globe, hydrangeas and moon vines. If you lose your shoes, pumice and strain. If you have no money, tin and clang.
As meditative practices focus on the axis of breath, these poems focus on the moment of action, of thought, on the flux of speech.
This is a poetry not of snapshots or collages but of long-exposed captures of the not-so-still lives of women. One sequence imagines Virginia Woolf’s childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, ‘On the Scent,’ makes us flâneurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while ‘The River Is All Thumbs’ uses a palette of vibrant repetition to ‘paint’ a landscape.
Queyras’s language – astute, insistent, languorous – repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do wemake a moment firm? These ‘postmodern,’ ‘postfeminist’ poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end?
‘Laced with Virginia Woolf-inspired content, Queyras cultivates a rhythm that rocks the reader through a frontier map of the twenty-first century woman ... Lemon Hound's unique rhythms provide immediate gratification while its layered substance affords greater fulfillment with each reading.’ – Verse
About the author
Sina Queyras is a Montreal/Tiohtià:ke-based writer, professor, editor, and literary organizer. They are the author of multiple poetry collections, a novel, and a book of essays, as well as the founder of the blog Lemon Hound, which was for many years the digital hub of the Canadian poetry scene. Recent work includes Rooms (Coach House Books, 2022), a blend of memoir, poetry, and criticism offering a peek into the defining spaces of the author as a young queer writer, and My Ariel (2017), a collection riffing on Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, reimagining, queering, and inhabiting its iconic poems. Queyras was also a co-editor of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (2020), which traces the essential feminist poet's innovation, experimentation, and activism across her body of work.
