The work of creating a fully habitable life with a past and present preoccupies Sonja Greckol. In Gravity Matters, she traces an arc: from a nineteenth-century European family that immigrated and settled in central Alberta to a digitized wondering held together by Skype and Google rooted in central Toronto. In this, a first collection, Greckol turns obliquely from the matters of largely personal lyrics to historical and international preoccupations that, nevertheless, remain embodied--a pentimento of certainties, sensualities and queries, empiricism and theory in science, moving from daughter to mother and then mother/daughtering once again--in a feminist voice that is urgent, empathic and wry. Her long poem, Emilie Explains Newton to Voltaire, a fractured sonetto magistrale voices a eighteenth-century physicist and noble woman, Emilie du Châtelet, a key figure of the Enlightenment and locates her in mind and body ands well as in her time. This poem was short-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2008.

SONJA GRECKOL began to write poetry when Mike Harris was re-elected in Ontario. Since, her work has appeared in Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, Dalhousie Review, CV2, Canadian Women's Studies, Fiddlehead and Matrix. She coordinates poetry for Women and Environments International Magazine and has served as the Associate Rep representative on the National Council of the League of Canadian Poets (2006-08). She has taught college and university, studied order and disorder in jokes, done human rights and gender-based research and consulting, and does local activism while she writes. Her long poem, 'Emilie Explains Newton to Voltaire,' was short-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2008.

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