Weaving together a modern retelling of Roman Empress Agrippina the Elder, a künstlerroman-inspired exploration of French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, and the contemporary portrait of an unhappily married mother, Bowman’s My Eyes Are Fuses is a bold exploration of tensions between freedom of art and the constraints of gender. Spanning centuries, these poems offer enchantments and antidotes, extract the poison from moments of pain, distil it down to a sweet elixir. Here, women are animals, witches, artists, rebels, imagined beyond their accomplishments, drawn together through time. With careful form, Bowman conjures a new chronicle for these women as time travellers, shapeshifters, goddesses akin to the three Fates, powerful beyond what their moments in time allowed of them.

Norah Bowman lives on Unceded Syilx Okanagan territory, home to ponderosa pines and bunchgrass. Norah is a poet, artist, and feminist writer whose interests include art, feminist movements around the world, equity for all, and protection of the earth. She is the author of Amplify! A Graphic Novel of Feminist Resistance (University of Toronto Press, 2019) and Breath, Like Water: An Anticolonial Romance (Caitlin Press, 2021).

Norah Bowman's profile page

“In My Eyes Are Fuses, Bowman oscillates between a sprawling, experimental poetic, journal entries, tight prose, and footnotes to present imagistic narrative moments loosely based on the lives of artist Niki de Saint Phalle, Roman Empress Agrippina, and the fictional, mononymic Nicole. Facts are often arranged into the fiction of historiography, but Bowman inverts this: transmuting fiction into truth. Through shattered cerulean language and imagined beats we witness a truth lifted far above the reach of facts: women, no matter how powerful, have and continue to be victims of male perpetrated violence. However, Bowman’s verse takes us one step further from the ground, asking us to look but avoiding the gaze, and releasing these women from the shackles of men, history, and artifact to ‘fly with the bullets / trees speed.’”

—Cole Mash, author of What You Did is All it Ever Means

“My Eyes are Fuses plunges us into the worlds of three women—Agrippina, Niki and Nicole—and the misogynies that made them. When we surface, we are in their thighs, their mouths, their beds, their art, tasked with putting the body parts back together. Something fuses, and something is rearranged. Bowman’s poems are scalpel-sharp, moving with precision and audacity, and a discombobulating clarity. What is the difference, they ask, between dying and surviving, between surviving and poetry, between weapons and words, between home and a weapon, between home and a whale, between a whale and the water, or between women? I read voraciously, trying to stay ahead of the blade.”

—Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology

“Norah Bowman’s My Eyes Are Fuses, as its title suggests, is a poetry collection laden with explosives of brutal insight, violence, and shocking transformation. Interweaving the life and work of French-American sculptor and painter Niki de Saint Phalle, the tragic legend of Roman Empress Agrippina, and the speaker’s reflections, the collection offers a knotty tapestry of intertextualities that refract and reject male violence and dehumanization of its gaze. Smart, brave, and incisive, this collection celebrates hard-wrought and sublime transmutations in all their mess and magic. This book is not to be missed.”

—Renée Harper, author of Boundary Territory