Echoic Mimic is a mixed-genre long poem whose narrative thread follows the tumultuous life of a girl named Ada through a complicated love-hate relationship with her small hometown and its inhabitants, as she leaves to land wide-eyed in a new big city. Cut loose from the comfort and insular world of art school, she tries to figure out who she's become and what to do next. Along the way, she must confront her personal myths by standing up to a confrontational character from her past, who continually inserts herself into Ada's narrative at all the wrong times. A modern epic in four acts, Echoic Mimic uses playful and clever language to explore the creation of a personal mythology, the disjuncture between self-concept and the outer world, exit strategies adopted for self-preservation, and the things we do to alleviate inner emptiness.

Lesley Trites is the author of a collection of poetry, Echoic Mimic (Snare/Invisible 2011). Her fiction has recently appeared in carte blanche, The Tupelo Quarterly, and the anthology Salut King Kong: New English Writing from Quebec, and her non-fiction has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Maisonneuve, the Montreal Review of Books, and The Montreal Gazette, among others. A finalist in the 2013 Quebec Writing Competition, Lesley grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick and now lives in Montreal.

Lesley Trites' profile page

“Imaginative and playful in form.”—Montreal Review of Books

Montreal Review of Books