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Poetry Women Authors

Congratulations, Rhododendrons

by (author) Mary Germaine

Publisher
House of Anansi Press Inc
Initial publish date
Apr 2021
Category
Women Authors, General, Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781487008680
    Publish Date
    Apr 2021
    List Price
    $19.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487008697
    Publish Date
    Apr 2021
    List Price
    $10.99

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Description

In her debut collection, Congratulations, Rhododendrons, award-winning poet Mary Germaine offers love poems to an insistently unlovely world.

Through poems that speak to plastic bags and drones as much as they admire roses and the moon, Germaine surfs the confluence of artificial and natural environments, technology, and our small but consequential feelings about them. At turns devotional and suspicious, these poems toe the boundaries of intimacy, responsibility, and reason.

In anxious times, anything can be taken as a sign; a crow, a talking coin, and a news report are all sources of information whose truth (or “fake-ness”) demand investigation. Germaine’s poems scroll from a shrine in Lourdes to an augmented-reality sandbox, from a mall filled with loitering ex–love interests to a fairy-tale ending where all the men turn out to be chairs. Funny, provocative, sly, and melancholic, Congratulations, Rhododendrons makes a case for the hope that every apparent disaster of social investment might in the end be redeemed as meaningful, genuine, or at least in some way helpful.

About the author

MARY GERMAINE is a poet, an educator, and a Ph.D. student at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Her poems have appeared inThe Walrus Magazine, Riddle Fence, the ArtSci Effect, and Augur Magazine. She was the recipient of the Adam Penn Gilders Scholarship for Creative Writing from the University of Toronto and the Heaslip Award from Memorial University. Her special talents include finding lost items and having a face that reminds people of someone else they know.

 

Mary Germaine's profile page