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Poetry Canadian

Miscreations

Poems

by (author) Grant Loveys

Publisher
ECW Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2020
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781770415225
    Publish Date
    Apr 2020
    List Price
    $19.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781773055060
    Publish Date
    Apr 2020
    List Price
    $13.99

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts & Letters Award and the Cuffer Prize for Fiction

Miscreations, the second collection by Grant Loveys, mulls over the metaphorical concept of miscreation — how people, objects, and relationships are imperfectly designed by their various creators — through the use of direct, visceral language, and frank, sometimes shocking, imagery.

Unconcerned with aesthetic imperfections, Miscreations focuses instead on how people and situations can be created from unstable, often opposing, elements and examines how these people and situations manage to survive. This is poetry that looks beyond a misprinted shirt and deep into the person wearing it … beyond empty memes and Instagram platitudes and into the complicated, flawed and searching human readers who navigate a world that is often at odds with itself.

About the author

Contributor Notes

Grant Loveys’s Our Gleaming Bones Unrobed was The Globe and Mail Readers’ Pick for the best poetry collection of 2012. He lives in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Excerpt: Miscreations: Poems (by (author) Grant Loveys)

Elsewhere

 

At midnight the shopping mall is dark

 

except for one glass walled porch

 

lit with mortuary fluorescence.

 

Inside two drunks pirouette

 

with a cardboard woman.

 

Their dilated shadows stretch

 

like columns of smoke

 

over the parking lot.

 

 

I interrupt their dance --

 

one drunk removes his hand from

 

a cardboard breast.

 

They have bent her head back with kisses.

 

It flops crudely between her corrugated shoulderblades,

 

between the two points where

 

wings would have burst from her back

 

had she been an angel.

 

 

In the morning, the sun unfurls

 

over the shopping mall

 

and a woman’s cardboard head

 

rises from the gutter, caught

 

in the wake of a passing bus --

 

a spirit radiant and lost

 

and looking for a host.

Editorial Reviews

“A rich and wordy whirlwind of a book. Many times throughout my reading I opted to read aloud to myself to help the sounds create better imagery for myself and I think it was my favorite part. This book came to ask me to participate, to let each vowel and consonant tell its story on my tongue and I am IMPRESSED.” — Mo Jayroe, Peabody Institute Library (Peabody, MA)

“The imagery and the words that he uses in each poem are just great. I found myself parsing out exactly what he was describing. The descriptors are so great, you can picture it in your minds eye. A lot of these poems evoked an emotion in me, which is what I look for in poetry — something that I can connect to.” — Justin a.k.a. Ghost Reader, YouTube