Orchid Heart Elegies

Here we stand between one breath / and death asking to be light. What happens when someone we love dies? Orchid Heart Elegies explores the fragmentation of loss. In luminous poems that echo the Duino Elegies, Zoë Landale – like an edgy, modern-day Rilke – takes the reader to a place of amazement. Enquiring into loneliness and the transformative power of a particular bioregion, Landale’s poems use language infused with the consolations of music to enact transformation. Following in the tradition of thousands of years of lyrical poetry, they gently suggest that we can bear our lives, no matter the pain, by means of a sole moment’s solace. Capturing the torn, jagged moments of grief and transforming them into poems of deep consolation and healing, Orchid Heart Elegies will appeal to any reader who has lost someone dear to them.

Opening the Storm Eye You spin the wheels of your red truck and speak of tornados you've known how they drive through homes and create orphans. I see your girlhood divided by unremarkable years and years where you crouched in the bathtub and prayed to the deep and steady anchor of the plumbing that you would be left alive after house and family had been sucked away. Picking out cherries from a roadside stand unaware of the change in weather, of you behind me. As your lips claim my neck the red relents in my fist. Coins scatter in the fruit as the sky rolls over us. The rain comes in sheets like the wings of netted birds throbbing and falling. While I buy the fruit you wait in your red truck playing the engine. I stumble to meet you drunk on the curve of your mouth, a cardinal on fermented autumn berries. With my tongue I would lick the dust from your eyes, I would offer shelter. Rachel Rose is a poet living in Montreal.

Here the long edge / of town Low / winter fog / ... My breath / my offering We are / our bodies burning Firmly rooted in fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness. In these poems human voices whisper through the natural world – a hand turns on a lamp to extinguish the stars; stones outline a sleeping form; a black eye is a storm cloud. Errington stokes vivid images, formal grace, and subtle humour into the flickers of life that hold fast against unforgiving terrain. Here language functions like a controlled burn, one that could at any moment preserve, perfect, or reduce to ash. Urgent, resonant to the bone, the swailing burns to the ember-edge of grief, memory, and control to find the wildness, wilderness, and wonder that remain.

so the long stretch of life / reveals its curvature / by those widely separated // moments when we are / brushed / by this awareness // of an other / that we do not know In his latest collection of poems, poet, deep state researcher, and radical medievalist Peter Dale Scott interrogates topics that have occupied his later thought and writing, such as moreness (our need, as humans, to be more than we are), minding, and enmindment (the generative synergy, engaging both hemispheres of our bicameral mind, of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, now out of kilter). In pursuit of these themes, Scott’s voice ranges far, from engaging with poets of the past and, hopefully, the future to critiques of coercive political power, from elegies for important figures in his life – Leonard Cohen, Daniel Ellsberg, Czeslaw Milosz, and Robert Silvers – to fan letters for “minders” Chelsea Manning and Dr Christine Blasey Ford. Dreamcraft is a book that crosses distances and straddles boundaries, moving from whistleblower law to the mimetic properties of DNA, from “the entropic spread / of the drifting cosmos / after the big bang” to “the push of lawn grass / under foot.”

Chomping / champing / championing / churlish / ... / There’s a wolf at the door / that looks exactly like me Who is the “whiny baby” in this book? Rather than calling names or hurling insults, the candid poems in this collection most often implicate the poet herself. Expansive in form and voice, the poems in Julie Paul’s second collection offer both love letters and laments. They take us to construction sites, meadows, waiting rooms, beaches, alleys, gardens, and frozen rivers, from Montreal to Hornby Island. They ask us to live in the moment, despite the moment. Including a spirited long poem that riffs on the fairy tale “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” these poems are like old friends that at once console and confess. They blow kisses, they remember, and they celebrate the broken and the lost alongside the beautiful. At turns frank, peevish, introspective, and mischievous, the poems share sincere and intimate perspectives on the changing female body, our natural and built landscapes, and the idiosyncrasies of modern life. Whiny Baby calls on us to simultaneously examine and exult in our brief time on earth.

Impulse said preserve the mess of construction, the unbiblical / carnage. This is my excuse for everything. Intensive and extensive, aboutness convenes across geographies and temporalities, in conversation with interlocutors living and dead, real and imagined. Set against a break-up with God, insomniac nights, and smoke-filled skies, this virgule-infused song of negation is by turns wry, performative, and sober. Threads of self-making are juxtaposed with an ever-unfolding present exposing the limits and possibilities of convergence. Marked by digression, asides, qualifiers, and a substructure of endnotes that together create layers of indeterminacy, aboutness takes the reader from Twin Peaks to Ganesh, Roland Barthes to Catullus, blue flamingoes to Ophelia, Agnes Martin to St Augustine. Haunted by the ghost of the text not realized, this is poetry that resists ossification and refuses to stand still, where the process of production is itself invited to the carnival.

The poet Charles Simic wrote, “Short poems: be brief and tell us everything.” Edward Carson’s extraordinary new work gathers concise diptych – or twofold – poems exploring themes of love, relationships, myth, art, language, math, physics, geometry, and artificial intelligence. Within the two sections of twofold, “dialogues” and “binaries,” the form of the diptych shapes language and meaning as paired poems engage each other across the margins of facing pages. Caroline Bem, author of A Moveable Form, writes: “The diptych, you see, is beautiful. It is symmetry and difference, doubling and mirroring, binarism and seriality. It is the form of paradox, both open and closed, free and contained.” Negotiating surprising twinning combinations, comparisons, and outcomes, the poems in twofold are lively, thought-provoking, and playful interchanges that are also mischievously literate, questioning, and intuitive.

Injury the guide explained / is what / guides explain Chatty Cathy, while not the first talking doll, was certainly the most widely known, and the only one elevated to idiom. This unauthorized chronicle of her later career luridly illustrates the perils of reaching such linguistic heights with so very little to say. In The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire Jojo, Gypsy May, Marge, Tootles, and Cathy’s entire gang undertake an abject odyssey to celebrity. On their adventure, they have many picnics, listen to NPR inattentively, play charades, and discover sharp things hidden in love’s thick folds. They end where they began, unutterably broken and luminous. Returning to the snarfs and loving exasperation of his first book, Excitement Tax, John Emil Vincent swipes left and right like no one else writing today. Because why would they?