Bridgett Devoue shares her raw, human story and the lessons learned from living a life fully. Soft Thornsis a poetry collection that takes the reader on a journey through a young woman’s life-from reckoning with her looks and sexuality to dealing with the trauma of sexual assault, and finally through the highs and lows of young love found and lost. I've so missed breezing through a typical poetry collection, in particular, the feelings evoked after, packing short impactful punches to carry y In its compassionate look at Chrissy’s living nightmare, In the Boom Boom Room is a piercing look at a society dangerously close to our own lives, and a drama that captures both our hearts and our heads.Soft Thornsis a poetry collection that takes the reader on a journey through a young woman’s life-from reckoning with her looks and sexuality to dealing with the trauma of sexual assault, and finally through the highs and lows of young love found and lost. In a desperate search for love and hope, Chrissy careens from the seductive mistress of ceremonies at the Boom Boom Room to the earnestly friendly gay man next door to a brutally passionate lover. Instead, she finds herself fighting to keep her dreams intact amid the anesthetic sex and stimulation that surround her, the psychological residue of her parents’ betrayals, and the bizarre pack of suitors who follow her.
Chrissy, a bright and not-quite-innocent woman with visions of a career as a dancer, finds herself in the Boom Boom Room, a disco/bar in Philadelphia meant to be her first step on the road to stardom. In the Boom Boom Room - A Play David RabeĪ searing portrait of a young dancer’s descent into hell-extensively revised and returned to the two-act structure originally intended by the author. Because as Canadian poets, it’s Babstock’s planet we’re walking on.’ In the wake of On Malice, I think we should prepare ourselves for a raft of source-text experiments and procedural treatises. ‘ has not only irrevocably altered our poetic climate but briskly evolved multiple new ecosystems in which his fellow songsters can work and flourish. Andit is not without its sinister edge.' – Ange Mlinko It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. 'The flavor of this poetry is complex – it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila.
SOFT THORNS POETRY FULL
'Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet, his work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity, it's all good.' – Peter Gizzi Channelling Spicer and Berryman, data-mining and inverting Hazlitt, Donne and Walter Benjamin’s son, these extended ghost-essays are lyric in their sonic and affective register but coldly methodological in their invented structures and repurposed illusions. On Malice assembles evacuated forms, polysemy, undirected prayer and meta-chatter into a quartet of delirious song, a diorama of our new, totalized and ubiquitous armour. We’ve internalized the panopticon, but it still feels good to buy. Our posthumous selves cry to us from the Cloud. The men were away and my heart already dead and the fairground monkey dead in my mouth.Ī spectre haunts a derelictNSA surveillance station on a hill in Berlin. One of The Globe and Mail's Globe 100: Best Books of 2014 Let him school you.' – Michael Robbins Show book I have no idea what that means, but Matthew Tierney does. 'Every p-brane sweeps out a (p+1)-dimensional world volume as it propagates through spacetime,' says Wikipedia.
These poems are all quantum fluctuation and collapse, language folding in on itself in the gorgeous vacuum of contemporary culture. 'It smothers us with normal,' Matthew Tierney writes in his spangled third collection, 'though we cleave to standard deviations.' Deviant, yes normal and standard, no. What continues to set Matthew Tierney's poems apart is their uncanny ability to find within the nomenclature of science not mere novelty but a new pathto human frailty, a renewed assertion of individuality, and a genuine awe at existence. Tierney's narrators grapple with the gap between what's seen and what's experienced, their minds tuned to one (probably) inevitable truth: the more I understand, the more I understand I'm alone. 'Time's not the market, it's the bustle / not the price but worth,'he muses, sailing through the rhythms and algorithms of a world made concrete by Samuel Johnson, before it was undone by Niels Bohr. These are high-energy poems, riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time.
If it were necessary to tell someone where I am, I’d say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles.I’d say I have loved.
Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013)