Dear Birch,
- Publisher
- Palimpsest Press
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2021
- Category
- LGBT, Women Authors
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781989287699
- Publish Date
- Apr 2021
- List Price
- $9.99
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Description
Three years after her mother’s death and on the brink of a break up, a bisexual writer sits in the company of an urban birch tree, auditing the odds of new loves entering her future. So begins Dear Birch, an intimate poem cycle that improvises within the permutability of grief, wind, reading, refusal and desire, listening for an ethos of ongoingness. Synthesizing memoir, votive and epistle, Margaret Christakos displays her trademark fidelity to writing as attentive process, imbuing her work with the polyamory of tender intelligence.
About the author
Margaret Christakos is attached to this earth. Born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario, she has worked as a poet, writer, editor, instructor, and poetry-culture builder in Toronto since the late 1980s. Her body of work includes nine collections of poetry, numerous chapbooks, a novel, and an inter-genre memoir. She has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and is a recipient of the ReLit Award for poetry and the Bliss Carman Award. Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos was published in 2017 (Laurier Poetry series). She has held appointments as Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor, Western University, London Public Library, and the University of Alberta. She is associate faculty with the MFA program in creative writing at University of Guelph-Humber and has taught widely as a sessional, most recently at Ryerson University. In 2018–2019, she was Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University College, University of Toronto. She has three adult children and lives in Toronto.
Editorial Reviews
"Dear reader, you will read Dear Birch, compulsively from start to finish, laying aside other urgencies to be gripped by these tender meditations and acute observations of the human and natural worlds. You will return for a second, slower reading to savour the intimacy of Christakos’s lyrical writing and the rigour of her self-inquiries. Afterwards, you will absorb the text's compassionate witnessing of “waves of woundedness” through the combined lens of parent, daughter, city-dweller and lover. And you will learn to fall in love with a tree, with the wind, “with the interrelation of trees in wind, wind in trees."
Maureen Hynes, author of Sotto Voce
