Main content

Heft

Available Formats:

  • Accessibility:
    • Customizable display
    • Described images
    • Heading navigation
    Certified Accessible By: National Network for Equitable Library Service
    Publisher:
    BC Libraries Cooperative, 2020
  • Accessibility:
    • Customizable display
    • Described images
    • Heading navigation
    • Table of contents navigation
    Certified Accessible By: National Network for Equitable Library Service
    Publisher:
    BC Libraries Cooperative, 2020

Details:

  • Date:
    Created
    2019
    Summary:

    From Toronto-based poet and editor Doyali Islam comes an intimate, luminous collection of poems that investigate the ruptures in our relationships. How does one inhabit a world in which the moon and the drone hang in the same sky? How can one be at home in one's own body in the presence of suspected autoimmune illness, severe chronic/recurrent pain, and a society that bears down with a particular construct of normal female sexual experience? What might a daughter salvage within a fraught relationship with a cancer-stricken father? Uncannily at ease with both high lyricism and formal innovation and invention, the poems in heft and sing are unafraid to lift up and investigate burdens and ruptures of all kinds--psychic, social, cultural, physical, and political--while also embodying notions of alignment and constraint. Providing continuity over the poet's visually-arresting forms--including Islam's self-termed split sonnets, double sonnets, and parallel poems--is allied remembrance of the resilience of the Palestinian people. Yet, the work doesn't always stray far from home, with a triad of astro-poems that weave together myth and memory. Here is a poet small in stature, unwilling to abandon to silence small histories, small life forms, and the small courages and beauties of the ordinary hour. In these deftly wrought poems, the spirit of the everyday and the spirit of witness bind fiercely to one another. heft and sing is a ledger of tenderness, survival, and risk.

    Contents:
    • Poem for your pocket
    • Astro-poems
    • Split sonnets
    • Double sonnets
    • Parallel poems
    • Ok
    • Postscript.
    Original Publisher: [Toronto], McClelland & Stewart
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9780771005596, 0771005598
    Collection(s)/Series: Griffin Poetry Prize 2020