Giving My Body to Science (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series) (Volume 4) - Softcover

Rose, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0773519041 ISBN 13: 9780773519046

Publisher: Carleton University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Opening the Storm Eye You spin the wheels of your red truck and speak of tornados you've known how they drive through homes and create orphans. I see your girlhood divided by unremarkable years and years where you crouched in the bathtub and prayed to the deep and steady anchor of the plumbing that you would be left alive after house and family had been sucked away. Picking out cherries from a roadside stand unaware of the change in weather, of you behind me. As your lips claim my neck the red relents in my fist. Coins scatter in the fruit as the sky rolls over us. The rain comes in sheets like the wings of netted birds throbbing and falling. While I buy the fruit you wait in your red truck playing the engine. I stumble to meet you drunk on the curve of your mouth, a cardinal on fermented autumn berries. With my tongue I would lick the dust from your eyes, I would offer shelter. Rachel Rose is a poet living in Montreal.

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Rose's work has appeared in various journals including Poetry, The Malahat Review and The Best American Poetry, as well as numerous anthologies. Her most recent poetry collection, Song & Spectacle (Harbour, 2012) won the Audre Lorde Award in the US and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award in Canada. She was the librettist for the opera When the Sun Comes Out, which grapples with fundamentalism and forbidden love. She is the winner of the Peterson Memorial Prize for poetry and the Bronwen Wallace award for fiction, and the recipient of a 2014 Pushcart Prize. She is the Poet Laureate of Vancouver for 2014-2017.

Review

"Fierce poems speaking out against the anonymity enforced by indifference, abuse, and sheer mortality. Fierce in their plain speaking, but not at all plain in their musicality. A lushness of imagery, passionate cadences, a voice that witnesses pain even as it celebrates love in all its guises. Rachel Rose has written an extraordinarily clear-eyed first book." Daphne Marlatt. "In images both harrowing and beautiful, always 'Luminescent/under the meat', this work moves me profoundly, as it disturbs." Mary di Michele. "Rachel Rose is writing a poetry of intense witness and emotional drive, always marked by the distinctive tang of raw experience and the sort of wisdom which can only be learned by a heart that is fully engaged." Don McKay.

Edition details

• Publisher: Carleton University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0773519041
• ISBN 13: 9780773519046
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160