This work of poetry reclaims both a childhood trauma and a fictionalized telling of that experience. Retrospectively gleaning bits from an autobiographical novel published early in her career, Sue Goyette’s process of “inverted redaction” extracts emotive words and images and gathers them into a new and freer account. Paired with her mythopoetic use of language, this technique of clipping and rearranging previously composed words escapes the confines of conventional narrative, embracing poetry’s adeptness at preserving expansive truths in the careful ordering of small particulars.

Sue Goyette has published nine books of poems and a novel. Her collections include The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, Penelope and Ocean (for which she was awarded the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017) and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and German and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spraypainted on a sidewalk and tattooed. She was nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several national awards including the Pat Lowther Award, the Bliss Carman Award, and the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry. She is the Artist in Residence in the Max Rady College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba and Poet Laureate for Halifax Regional Municipality. She lives in Halifax (K'jipuktuk) where she teaches in the creative writing at Dalhousie University.

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