Church of the Exquisite Panic: the Ophelia Poems
Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems is a study of how “song by song down the long corridor” we feel our way through this life. The book’s point of view shifts through several sections, building narrative; and at the center of the narrative lies an old question: how do we each find our voice? "Journey / is a type of singing…/ Th …
When I Was Young and In My Prime
2006 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD NOMINEE & NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"A deeply humane, deeply human book."
- Michael Crummey
"Moving, funny, full of hard truths."
- Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail
What's left of us when we're gone? In When I Was Young and In My Prime, a young woman watches her grandparents begin to decline. As she sorts through the couple's belon …
Terrible to say, but there's a glamour in decay. All the sugars rising to the surface. Even the making of wine is a kind of controlled decomposition.
The last days have an atmosphere in which everything stands out, back-lit, finite. Photographers call it magic hour. As if death, closer now, closer every day, radiates a kind of pre-storm light.
And then that pre-storm light lasts for a spell after death--for the living. Basic things take on new definition, demand attention, but resist naming.
