Poetry

When Diane Tucker hangs up a payphone in Nostalgia for Moving Parts' title poem, she observes that 'there is (oh unexpected pleasure) a real click.' When she lays down to sleep: 'the prayers / that fight up through me make a sort of hum.' Click and hum. Nostalgia and prayer. What's been and what will always be. Nostalgia for Moving Parts reminds us how to hear and see the ephemeral in the eternal and the eternal in the ephemeral: the moving parts of all our lives.

—Rob Taylor, Strangers

Diane Tucker's gentle humour combines with a refreshing directness of language and a sharply observed sense of colour and texture. As she explores her own Vancouver background and memories, she meditates on the loss of her parents and her own ageing.

— Christopher Levenson, Night Vision

None have rendered the wrenching of war’s dislocations with such intensity and beauty as Sarah Ens. Flyway is sorrow artfully spun into a lyric that mends as it quests, gathers, scatters, and laments. Her family’s story of the all too common women’s flight for survival emerges with intimacy and urgency. This book is a triumph for any time, but savor it now, as power and grace in a troubled world.

—Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Flyway situates itself as a poem in a biodiverse temporality where all species of home is rooted. Its address, O / downtrodden / stray, directed to those scrambling for purchase on a soft ridge of song is a balm so many people on the planet could use right now as they journey to be welcomed. The question that persists, that thrums beneath this poem is as simple and endangered as tallgrass: How do you remember home?

—Sue Goyette

Flyway charts the devastation and dislocation of war, a haunting that becomes an inheritance. Tracing migrations both inexorable and precarious, with the tallgrass as her teacher, Sarah Ens creates a work of imagination wider than the horizon.

—Laurie D. Graham

Flyway is a tender and urgent re-negotiation of place, displacement, memory, and war. The poems are elemental, touched by bread and metal, grass and stone.

—Benjamin Hertwig

These intimate and intertwined poems gleam with a tenderness that belies their tensile strength. Lawrence mines consequential moments with sharp insight, revealing fissures in her life and the lives of those closest to her. Here is a sure-footed poet whose inventive language wrests bittersweet wisdom and uncommon grace out of the ordinary. Black Umbrella is an extraordinary collection, rich and indelible.

—Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Following the River: Traces of Red River Women

The poems in Black Umbrella chart a lifetime’s emotional weather in deft, compelling strokes. With insight, compassion, and piercing wit, Katherine Lawrence retraces the winds that blew her from steel town to prairie, mourns her losses, and reminds us that what we need is not the answers to all our questions, but "the true names." Black Umbrella is a beautiful, resonant book.

—Susan Olding, Big Reader and Pathologies: A Life in Essays

Katherine Lawrence’s Black Umbrella delves into "the sub-rosa conspiracy of the psyche," unearthing memories like tiny fragments of bone. Deeply personal, this work is a fearless recounting of love and betrayal, arrivals and departures, childhood trauma, love again. "Sly as a butcher’s thumb," Lawrence plays with language and imagery like a child with a knife. A precocious child. A sharp knife. Ultimately revealing a "brave, surefooted, animal self."

—Mari-Lou Rowley, Unus Mundus