- Runner-up, Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award
In the title poem of this extraordinary first book, Sally Ito remembers her childhood in Alberta, when she set frogs in the rain barrel and watched them swim like stars in a "pool of still and nether depths/ whose mirrored surface was all."
Those imagined depths become a powerful metaphor in these poems, which reflect Ito's experiences as a young Japanese Canadian living and writing in Alberta, the Northwest Territories, the West Coast and Japan. Hers is a distinct poetic voice, equally at ease with such diverse images as an aged Chinese man on the train, the Inuit goddess of the sea and the first crocus of spring. Frogs in the Rain Barrel was runner-up for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award in 1996.
close this panel
I have not met a man
so strong as the snake
who grabbed my ankles
and wrestled me to the ground.
No, not even you, Jacob.
If in that night,
I had a branch,
I would have chased it off.
But the enormity of it,
the promise of its poison!
At long last,
the liberating of my thighs
to the cry of birth.
Forgive me, dear Jacob, forgive me
but I too have wrestled,
with this monster
called Love.
