What does it mean to make a home inside a story? Stories are safe, comfortable, familiar. Fairytales and myths, these stories we all know and grew up with are even moreso.

A Refuge of Tales takes everyday tropes and asks: safe for who? This is a collection of poems for anyone who has ever felt outside of the myth.

With language both sharp and lyrical, Lynne Sargent weaves a treatise on the power of stories, and how those who have been left behind can take up that power and use it to build a new, better world.

Lynne Sargent is a writer, aerialist, and philosophy Ph.D student living in Hamilton and currently studying at the University of Waterloo. Their works have appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Wild Musette, and Augur Magazine, and have been nominated for Aurora and Rhysling awards. A Refuge of Tales is their first poetry collection, and it was funded through an Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grant.

Lynne Sargent's profile page

“Filled with irony, rage, humour, and compassion, this poetry collection takes our fairy tales and fables, and all the stories we tell ourselves, and doesn’t simply deconstruct them, but blasts them into tiny shards, razor-sharp and beautiful.”

Su J Sokol, author of the Sunburst-nominated novel, Cycling to Asylum

“Lynne Sargent is a modern day Persephone, plumbing the depths of womanhood. Sargent excavates rage in feminist poetry that draws on the imagery of myth and fairy tale in novel and startling ways. She's an expert at that last surprising line that turns the whole thing on its head and makes us see the story through a new lens.” Ursula Pflug, author of Seeds and Other Stories

"These beautiful lines in Lynne Sargent's new collection, while unmasking myth, create and then lay bare the stories we tell ourselves about family, relationships and about ourselves. Sargent's topography of longing and resurrection bring us soaring and sighing, returning us to a landing, lightly or with all the force of human longing and pain, in our present world but now with a new-found understanding of the origins and particularities of that longing. Within this refuge of tales, the human is dismantled, exposing the molecular state of what it means to be molded of this world." – Sharon Lax, author of the short story collection Shattered Fossils