Painters use the term "fugitive pigments" to describe those colours most prone to fading after a brief exposure to light. In Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle, poet and visual artist Jessica Hiemstra uses the idea of fugitive colour to explore the grieving process; whether her subject is a lost grandparent, language, child, painting or cat, Hiemstra renders the fleetingness of life with fine, delicate strokes.

"The poet listens, tastes and remembers, senses afloat, dipping into the pastand then surfacing again, drawn by a perfect but fleeting moment." - Descant

Jessica Hiemstra is an author and poet who is widely published in literary journals. She was the winner of the Malahat Review's 2010 Open Season Award for Non?Fiction, a finalist for the 2010 Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem, and the winner of the 2009 Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival poetry award. No stranger to collaboration, Jessica is currently writing a novel with her mother and working on a collaborative poetry project with other Canadian poets called Translating Horses.

Jessica Hiemstra's profile page

"Hiemstra is masterful as she blends together art, memory and sense."St. Catharines Standard

"The poems themselves-free-verse stanzas whose titles are almost always composed of subject and verb, and whose sentences often overlap with the first lines of subsequent sections-dart in and out [of] narratives ... [and] are strongest when the narrative stakes are highest ... tender and convincing." - EVENT