When Whales Went Back to the Water
Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird’s When Whales Went Back to the Water creates a reverent container for a broken world. These poems are hymns to living in wonder through loss, joy, motherhood’s sleepless nights, domestic violence, and isolation. Offering a courageous account of queer intimate partner violence, including the impacts of femme erasure in queer communities, this book is also grounded in the tastes and textures of a new parent’s everyday and is keenly interested in our capacities during personal and global catastrophe. Haunted by hawks, coyotes, frogs, and forests, the collection also speaks to the power of the beyond-human sphere in the translation and transformation of pain and sorrow. Reaching through stories of survivorship to touch on personal and collective pain with tension, nuance and care, these poems remind us that grief is inextricably intertwined with love and joy.
Now available from the University of Alberta Press, or your local bookstore.
Persephone’s Crickets
Persephone’s Crickets is a series of poems (with a concluding essay) in conversation with the Persephone myth, upending the traditional narrative to imagine increased agency for Persephone in the face of this much-told tale of abduction and captivity.
The chapbook is exquisitely hand-sewn by Karen Schindler at Baseline Press, a poetry micropress based in London ON.
Reviewed by Tom Cull for The Fiddlehead’s “Stop! Look! Listen!” reading recommendation page here.
Winter’s Cold Girls
This fresh and visceral debut explores themes of trauma and recovery, everyday violence, and queerness from a personal point of view as well as a wider political context. These poems are interested in the resilience of bodies and sexualities, often grounded in an earthy humour. The style shifts from lyric to deeply personal narrative to fantastical: an old woman plants broken light bulbs and harvests dark flowers, two sisters grow feathers in a nest in the backyard maple, a mother turns into a deer and escapes the unspeakable through a kitchen window. These are poems of disruption, discovery, and witness—balancing brutal honesty with a welcoming intensity. They want you to come close.
Available from Caitlin Press or from your local bookstore, Winter’s Cold Girls was shortlisted for the 2020 Relit Award for poetry.
