Nothing You Can Carry
- Publisher
- Thistledown Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2020
- Category
- Canadian, Women Authors
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781771871983
- Publish Date
- Sep 2020
- List Price
- $20.00
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Description
Nothing You Can Carry is rooted in a keen, even holy, sense of place within the natural world. Today that place is haunted by anxiety over a precarious present and a darker future. These poems take an honest, sometimes ironic and sometimes broken-hearted look at how the self and society are implicated in our climate crisis and the systemic complexities surrounding it.
Yet life goes on. The collection moves through environmental fears and spills into all the areas that absorb the self – memory, story, family, love.
These poems are vivid and vulnerable, humorous and emotional. They summon the deeper mysteries of being human in a world that is increasingly separate from the sacred.
About the author
Susan Alexander is the winner of the 2016 Short Grain poetry prize and the 2015 Vancouver Writers’ Festival Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in SubTerrain, Arc, CV2, Grain, Room, The Antigonish Review, and PRISM international. She is a regular at Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane’s poetry retreats. For inspiration, Alexander writes from eclectic experiences — as a chambermaid, CBC Radio journalist, stay-at-home mother, waitress, lay preacher, and associate at a boutique investment firm, as well as from her family history and passions. She is an associate member of the League of Canadian Poets
Excerpt: Nothing You Can Carry (by (author) Susan Alexander)
“Hosanna”
Every flower
that opens is a hosanna
a prayer heard
that only needs
be answered
yes
prayer is not asking
not supplication
prayer is dwelling
in the rapture
common as weeds
swarming so close
upon us
beyond the fear of being
untethered
by wonder
you are carried
deep within
to the fuse
that made you
yes