Silence in the belly of the breathing house. Night so deep / it’s reaching through rooms as if searching its pockets.

Standing in the midst of her childhood home, Margo Wheaton was struck by two things: the extent of the damage caused by her father’s and stepmother’s alcoholism and the life force that pulsed in the once-vibrant rooms and yard – in the abandoned trees, neglected flowerbeds, and gardens her parents had planted and tended for decades.

Radiant, grieving, and intensely musical, Rags of Night in Our Mouths is an exploration of human and environmental states of precarity and vulnerability. In the opening suite, Wheaton draws upon her family’s deep roots in the Tantramar Marsh area and constructs a hallucinatory world of fragility, chaos, and searing natural beauty as she writes her own version of Maritime gothic. Employing a variation of the ghazal, a historically Persian form popularized in Canada by the late New Brunswick–based poet John Thompson, she surveys the ruins of her working-class childhood home, a thriving place now ravaged by generational alcoholism and despair. Directed at first toward an absent beloved – a convention of the ghazal tradition – the focus moves in the second suite to the teeming, non-human world of an endangered saltmarsh on a wild shore of the Northumberland Strait bordering Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. In the book’s closing suite, Wheaton honours a landscape slated to be destroyed and pays homage to “the broken-hearted, the bereaved” who walk the ragged shoreline, struggling to make sense of losses and death.

Meditative and beautifully crafted, Rags of Night in Our Mouths calls us to engage passionately with our suffering world.

Margo Wheaton is the author of The Unlit Path Behind the House, which won the Fred Kerner Book Award from the Canadian Authors Association. She was born in New Brunswick and lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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“Rags of Night in Our Mouths is a haunting masterpiece of intimate negotiation. Harnessing all powers of the senses, these poems reach out to feel their way through darkened rooms, wild weather, and lost landscapes of the past and present. This is an unforgettable performance, and perhaps the most viscerally honest book of poetry to come out of Atlantic Canada in the last decade.” Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting and Animal Person

“Margo Wheaton’s poetry of brooding hours and raw intensities is polished by phrasing of rare precision. In places both outer and inner, we hear a ‘primal / speech of branches clacking’ and learn that ‘family’s / an old night, its chaos Miltonic.’ Readers will find themselves riveted, their lives expanded by this strong-hearted book packed with truthfulness, tenderness, and music.” Brian Bartlett, author of Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal