Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Poetry Canadian

Lemon Hound

by (author) Sina Queyras

Publisher
Coach House Books
Initial publish date
Mar 2006
Category
Canadian, Women Authors
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781770561274
    Publish Date
    Mar 2006
    List Price
    $10.95
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781552451670
    Publish Date
    Mar 2006
    List Price
    $16.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

2007 Winner of the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Literary Award

If you open your mouth, ache. If you don’t open your mouth, swelter. If you open your mouth but hold your breath, ether. If you look for colour, coral and tea leaves. If you follow the moon, wet and concrete. If you cling to the earth, pistol and candy apple. If you give up your garden, maze and globe, hydrangeas and moon vines. If you lose your shoes, pumice and strain. If you have no money, tin and clang.

As meditative practices focus on the axis of breath, these poems focus on the moment of action, of thought, on the flux of speech.

This is a poetry not of snapshots or collages but of long-exposed captures of the not-so-still lives of women. One sequence imagines Virginia Woolf’s childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, ‘On the Scent,’ makes us flâneurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while ‘The River Is All Thumbs’ uses a palette of vibrant repetition to ‘paint’ a landscape.

Queyras’s language – astute, insistent, languorous – repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do wemake a moment firm? These ‘postmodern,’ ‘postfeminist’ poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end?

‘Laced with Virginia Woolf-inspired content, Queyras cultivates a rhythm that rocks the reader through a frontier map of the twenty-first century woman ... Lemon Hound's unique rhythms provide immediate gratification while its layered substance affords greater fulfillment with each reading.’ – Verse

About the author

Sina Queyras is an accomplished poet and essayist. She edited the first anthology of Canadian poetry published by an American press (Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets). Between 2005 and 2007 she co-curated the path-breaking feminist Belladonna* reading series in New York and was instrumental in bringing Canadian and American poets into conversation. She has published six books of poetry and a novel, Autobiography of Childhood (2011). She received the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Literary Award for Lemon Hound (2006). Her most recent book of poetry is MxT (2014).

Sina Queyras' profile page