Reckless women inhabit the spaces of these poems: women who dare to travel without maps or even "a single sign," women who dare the seduction of cliff edge leaps into deadly waters, women who dare the midnight garden to ensure their crop. When Cecelia Frey considers the pain recklessness causes to others, she returns to the source that impels a reckless nature.

There Frey finds women who challenge the empty spaces of the psychic frontier, women who let themselves be seduced by the vanilla man (or is it the other way around?), female magicians, performing aquabelles, women "who toss their clothes from the balcony / and have nothing to go home in." She also learns that recklessness is a dangerous game. That's when poetry itself comes to the rescue.

When Frey reaches love's end and is herself silenced, the poems speak that silence. When "cold camphor travels her veins," the poems rant and defy, but they also instruct. They teach her to believe even when belief seems impossible. In the face of death, they speak of love. In despair of life, they assert that the trick is to achieve moments of joy. The female magician's task is to pull off such tricks: "lark / from fire / its white wings raised / singing."

Cecelia Frey was born in Northern Alberta, grew up in Edmonton and now lives in Calgary. Her short stories and poetry have been published in dozens of literary journals and anthologies as well as being broadcast on CBC radio and performed on the Women’s Television Network. Her last novel, A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing, was shortlisted for the 2009 Writers Guild of Alberta Fiction Award and she is a three-time recipient of the WGA Short Fiction Award. She has also won awards for play writing. Cecelia is the author of poetry collections: the least you can do is sing; Songs Like White Apples Tasted; And Still I Hear Her Singing; Reckless Women; and Under Nose Hill; short story collections: The Nefertiti Look; The Love Song of Romeo Paquette; and Salamander Moon; and novels: Breakaway; The Prisoner of Cage Farm; A Fine Mischief and A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing. Her play, The Dinosaur Connection, was produced on CBC’s Vanishing Point series.

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