Shauna Paull’s long-awaited 2nd book of poetry is elegant and wise.

Limned in deep listening, blue gait is an elegant songbook in the key of alterity. It offers witness to another way of living where human and material concerns are not at the centre of things and where human ascendency and heroic catharsis is redressed. The poems articulate the salient issues and sorrows of global communities; the grace and necessity of respect. Here is sung the labour of our elders, environmentalists, of daughters and lovers, elements and simple gifts made by hands, songs to answer our longing for a loving place in the failing loom of our generous planet.

shauna paull is a poet, educator and community advocate, and completed her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Paull’s first book, roughened in undercurrent was published by Leaf Press (2008). Shauna has led creative writing workshops at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, since 2000 and for many different organizations in Vancouver. In community, shauna has worked extensively with migrant and refugee women in areas of labour and mobility rights, poverty alleviation and legislative reform. Shauna represented Canada at the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 2006. Her work can be found in RockSalt, an Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, (Mother Tongue, 2008) ,Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia (Mother Tongue, 2013) and In All the Spaces: Diverse Voices in Global Women’s Poetry, (Autopress, New Delhi, 2020).

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