About this book
- Winner of the Book Design Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
- Honourable Mention from the Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada!
By turns tender and rough-hewn, and always structurally inventive, the poems in Wendy McGrath’s new collection show a writer reaching the height of her creative powers.
Whether evoking the vulgar give-and-take of a men’s poker night, fleeting moments of connection between mothers and sons, afternoons spent in overgrown backyard gardens, or wondrous childhood trips to the drive-in, McGrath’s feel for the bygone details of working-class life is uncanny. The book’s highlight is the playful poetic sequence that gives the book its title, the product of a more-than-decade-long improvisational collaboration with printmaker Walter Jule, a series of not-quite-mirror poems whose meanings reflect on each other in kaleidoscopic ways.
Reviews
regarding the images in the book: "Walter Jule's visual images are aids to meditation, communicating on an intuitive level that which cannot be expressed in words. In them we experience in suspended time the knife's edge between creation and destruction."
"Wendy McGrath shows how a poetic novelty, the mirror poem, can become an important new form. Hamlet spoke of holding the mirror up to nature. McGrath holds the mirror up to art, but she also tells us about the nature of desire and separation, about truth and lies."
"[f]ragmentary and experimental, impressionistic daguerrotypes of everyday life." full review
"Its stanzas experiment with the visual aspect of text, spreading out across largely blank pages with their own quiet artfulness." full review
"She has given substance top billing, and this collection is rich with detail, honing in on the most delicate, intangible moments and weaving in the raw, often conflicting beauty of city and nature, creating whole new textures with the experiences exposed within." full review
