Tidal Fury intermeshes styles in narratorial strands. A love story -- he was "a literary device, and then I discovered we knew each other intimately." An aged narcissist who wields power and invokes a subtext on the social politics of power. A poet whose muse is Medusa. Tidal Fury is a poetry on the edge of the text of an interior ocean of fury and passion.

Brenda Clews is a multi-media poet and artist. She hosts a Poetry & Music Salon in Toronto and has published the luminist poems (LyricalMyrical Press) and Tidal Fury (Guernica Editions) with solo art shows at York University, Q Space and Urban Gallery.

Brenda Clews' profile page

Tidal Fury is a richly layered, challenging collection by a multi-talented woman. Each line of Tidal Fury shuttles and re-strands a woman immersed in art, culture, mythology who braids and beads words and images in a complex, often erotically-charged conversation with various characters and with the reader, whom she meets “at the edge of the text.”

John Oughton, author of Time Slip and Death by Triangulation

Tidal Fury is a ground-breaking book both in content and form. Presented in the poet’s voice as a series of conversations with and about imaginary figures, her lover/animus, ‘Monsieur’, and her shadow/alter ego/Muse, the poetry is a sumptuous ode to the creative process, its passions and its pain, a seashell echoing the depths of the ocean, words that sometimes drown the poet and on which, at other times, the poet surfs, like Shiva and Shakti, dancing her struggles into life.

OpusOne Review

The fierce, lyrical narrative shifts from invoking the mythological in “Pythia, Priestess of Apollo” and the erotic in “Remember the Night…” and “Approach” to the reminiscence of letters to an absent lover in “Letter in Saffron” and the cerebral wordplay of “Intimacy.” Incorporating ruminations on, and hallucinations of, time and space, Tidal Fury is also an examination of identity, including the masking of identity, featuring a compelling personification of jealousy in the form of the old woman and her relationship with the sea as she keeps a vice-like grip on the tide line. The ebb and flow of time, passion and the sea – as the waves undulate, so to do the bodies.

Cate McKim