Latent Heat
- Publisher
- Signature Editions
- Initial publish date
- Dec 1997
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780921833550
- Publish Date
- Dec 1997
- List Price
- $14.95
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Description
Catherine Hunter articulates complex questions with utter simplicity, releasing the passion that often lies beneath surfaces of our ordinary lives, and guiding us, through subtle connections on many levels, until we "can hear the city breathe." Latent Heat presents a surprisingly full and lyrical exploration of the lives we live together in this place, the suffering, the confusion, and those evanescent moments that sustain us.
About the author
Catherine Hunter's last poetry collection, Latent Heat, won the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award. Four of the poems in St. Boniface Elegies, originally published in Contemporary Verse 2, won the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Poem or Suite of Poems and earned Honorable Mention in the National Magazine Awards. Her most recent novel, After Light (Signature), spans four generations of an Irish-American-Canadian family in a tale of love, war, trauma, and the power of art, and was a finalist for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher, and the High Plains Book Award for Best Woman Writer. She has also published several mysteries with Ravenstone/Turnstone, and recorded a spoken word CD (Rush Hour, from Cyclops Press, with a bonus track by The Weakerthans). Her writing has appeared in the literary journals The Malahat Review, Prism International, Essays on Canadian Writing, Matrix, West Coast Line, Prairie Fire, CV2, and Grain, and the anthologies The Echoing Years: Contemporary Poetry from Canada and Ireland; Post Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry; Best Canadian Poems 2013; Best Canadian Poems 2015; and (forthcoming) Best Canadian Poems 2019. She edited Exposed, an anthology of five new women poets, and Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier, and for ten years she was the editor of The Muses' Company poetry press. Since 1991, she has enjoyed teaching literature and creative writing at the University of Winnipeg.
Excerpt: Latent Heat (by (author) Catherine Hunter)
13 Lines in Order to Forget You
a scientist draws a picture of the brain on the blackboard, she labels the memory with a piece of chalk
a doctor raises his hand, a question flutters on the tip of his tongue what were we talking about again?
meanwhile, a patient with amnesia wanders down the hall and walks out of the hospital how easily you've slipped my mind
I have forgotten you, and if I were the two-headed woman on the cover of the National Enquirer today
I would forget you twice
The Naked Eye (in memoriam, HJB)
You are so far away, or let's be truthful, you've been dead for twenty years, a synapse in the brain of the city, these streets so fractured, full of spaces. I thought I saw you again this morning, walking the maze of paths behind the planetarium, as if you remembered the time the teachers took us up there, let us read the sky. They told us any loss of matter is converted into energy. They gave us telescopes and metaphors: You disappeared at the speed of light. But some things are apparent only to the naked eye. I can stand on the Norwood Bridge and seem to touch the potent circuit of the river. Venus, small as the spurt of a penny match, appears suspended, caught in the gap of the St. Boniface cathedral's excoriated window frame. The downtown lights are sparks the city lets go, attempting to purify itself. This city is still hot, young friend, white hot. It runs on the electricity conducted through the streets when heroes turn to constellations. It's heat that separates the metal from the ore, because in metallurgy, as in death, beauty smoulders closer and closer to the surface of the body, becoming visible at last, setting itself free. The burnt cathedral, with its empty window open like a mouth, says, ah. The sound of finding what it's lost. If you can see me, make some sign. Darkness is settling down, all over the suburbs, and Venus is rising. I can almost see the passion that set her blazing like a flare, an SOS, a way of saying, don't stop looking for me. I am here.
Editorial Reviews
“Catherine Hunter grew up in Winnipeg, where she listened well to the rhythm and music of the streets, supermarkets and malls. Her well-attuned ear captures this rhythm and music. In Latent Heat, she plays with it until it pirouettes onto the page in unexpected, yet hauntingly appropriate and beautiful images. Latent Heat is a work of exceptional poetic inspiration and ability. Hunter combines the talent and technique of the storyteller with the finely chiselled images of the poet. Lovers of poetry will sink into the cool, clear waters of Hunter's vision, never once asking to come up for air. But those who aren't will also find much to enjoy. Meaning here is not buried under mountains of words. It floats on the surface of magnificently flowing lines.”
—The Winnipeg Free Press
