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Poetry Canadian

Nothing You Can Carry

by (author) Susan Alexander

Publisher
Thistledown Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2020
Category
Canadian, Women Authors
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771871983
    Publish Date
    Sep 2020
    List Price
    $20.00

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Description

Nothing You Can Carry is rooted in a keen, even holy, sense of place within the natural world. Today that place is haunted by anxiety over a precarious present and a darker future. These poems take an honest, sometimes ironic and sometimes broken-hearted look at how the self and society are implicated in our climate crisis and the systemic complexities surrounding it.

 

Yet life goes on. The collection moves through environmental fears and spills into all the areas that absorb the self – memory, story, family, love.

 

These poems are vivid and vulnerable, humorous and emotional. They summon the deeper mysteries of being human in a world that is increasingly separate from the sacred.

About the author

Susan Alexander is the winner of the 2016 Short Grain poetry prize and the 2015 Vancouver Writers’ Festival Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in SubTerrain, Arc, CV2, Grain, Room, The Antigonish Review, and PRISM international. She is a regular at Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane’s poetry retreats. For inspiration, Alexander writes from eclectic experiences — as a chambermaid, CBC Radio journalist, stay-at-home mother, waitress, lay preacher, and associate at a boutique investment firm, as well as from her family history and passions. She is an associate member of the League of Canadian Poets

Susan Alexander's profile page

Excerpt: Nothing You Can Carry (by (author) Susan Alexander)

“Hosanna”

 

Every flower

 

that opens is a hosanna

 

a prayer heard

 

that only needs

 

be answered

 

yes

 

 

 

prayer is not asking

 

not supplication

 

prayer is dwelling

 

in the rapture

 

common as weeds

 

swarming so close

 

upon us

 

 

 

beyond the fear of being

 

untethered

 

by wonder

 

you are carried

 

deep within

 

to the fuse

 

that made you

yes