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Poetry General

Bones of His Being, The

by (author) Sue Chenette

Publisher
Guernica Editions
Initial publish date
Apr 2012
Category
General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781550713695
    Publish Date
    Apr 2012
    List Price
    $15.00

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Description

In unflinching lyrics, Sue Chenette confronts her father's depression and death. Probing memories, fingering mementos - a square nail, a sketch on a napkin, she examines them for what they may reveal of the father she was sure she knew, deepened, in death, into the mystery of his own being. The poems are a journey through grief, both a search for the father she loved and a searching look into a father/daughter relationship. At the heart of the book, the sequence 'A Transport of Grief' explores a weave of pain, need, and blame, of family grudges and love, moments of solace, and the sweeping sense of loss that attends a parent's death

About the author

Sue Chenette is the author of Slender Human Weight (Guernica Editions, 2009), The Bones of His Being (Guernica Editions, 2012), and the documentary poem What We Said (Motes Books, 2019), based on her time as a social worker in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Her chapbooks include Solitude in Cloud and Sun, A Transport of Grief, and The Time Between Us, which won the Canadian Poetry Association's Shaunt Basmajian Award in 2001. A classical pianist, poet, and editor, she grew up in northern Wisconsin and has made her home in Toronto since 1972.

Sue Chenette's profile page

Editorial Reviews

Sue Chenette's poems are gorgeously precise, writing a 'careful cursive' through the past, putting memories in their place. Slender Human Weight is full of the most elegant ghostings, as if Chenette herself were the life force, her sights on everything, from fruit bowls to faith, from buttons to full-blown love. {Barry Dempster}

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