Radio Weather confronts the changeableness of life—how existence can switch gears with the speed of announced-for snow that turns abruptly to rain. Shoshanna Wingate’s first book runs the gauntlet of her various roles—mother, wife, daughter—in taut, unsentimental, immaculately constructed poems that explore the tension between personal imperatives and fickle outside forces. Marked by a vision broad enough take in both a pigeon fancier neighbour and a murderer on death row, Wingate tracks the moments that—midstep, midway, midlife—alter us from who we might have been to who we are now. “The days depart in minor steps,” she writes, “then slip away for costume change.” Radio Weather is a memorable debut by a poet of exceptional promise.

Shoshanna Wingate’s poetry and fiction have been published in The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Arc Poetry Magazine. A poetry chapbook, Homing Instinct, appeared from Frog Hollow Press in 2012. Founding editor of the arts & culture journal, Riddle Fence, she lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland with her husband and child.

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