Radio Weather confronts the changeableness of life--how existence can switch gears with the speed of announced-for snow that turns abruptly to rain. Shoshanna Wingate's first book runs the gauntlet of her various roles--mother, wife, daughter--in taut, unsentimental, immaculately constructed poems that explore the tension between personal imperatives and fickle outside forces. Marked by a vision broad enough take in both a pigeon fancier neighbour and a murderer on death row, Wingate tracks the moments that--midstep, midway, midlife--alter us from who we might have been to who we are now. "The days depart in minor steps," she writes, "then slip away for costume change." Radio Weather is a memorable debut by a poet of exceptional promise.

Shoshanna Wingate’s poetry and fiction have been published in The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Arc Poetry Magazine. A poetry chapbook, Homing Instinct, appeared from Frog Hollow Press in 2012. Founding editor of the arts & culture journal, Riddle Fence, she lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland with her husband and child.

Shoshanna Wingate's profile page

"Clear-eyed, musical, deeply-considered and deeply-felt, Radio Weather contends with the inhospitable. Bringing both child and adult perspectives to bear, it calls to account both the living and the dead. Brilliantly-crafted and wise, occupying a provisional space that is both wary and compassionate, somewhere 'between what we didn't want and what we could afford,' these are poems of great psychological tension, poems for grown ups." --Patrick Warner.