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Torch River

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  • Publisher:
    Brick Books, 2007
    Note: This book was purchased with support from the Government of Canada's Social Development Partnerships Program - Disability Component.

Details:

  • Date:
    Created
    2007
    Summary:

    Winner, Lesbian Poetry at the 2008 GCLS Literary Awards (Golden Crown Literary Awards) and nominated for LGBT Poetry at the Lambda Literary Awards

    Shortlisted for the 2007 Anne Szumigalsi Award for Poetry and the 2007 Saskatoon Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards

    “Beneath these sensually charged images lies a complex interrogation of the paradox of nature.” (Quill and Quire)

    In this stunning new collection, Elizabeth Philips takes us down into the swirling core of planetary energies, the central mystery of life itself. Sexual love, the wilderness, the births and deaths that connect them, the breathing and the not-breathing that connect birth and death, the interior wilderness of desire and the sensual love of wild things, of trees, earth, water – these are Philips’s themes and subjects, rendered in a language of tremendous immediateness and authority. These are poems that will take your own breath away, that will give it back to you bigger, deeper than you imagined possible.

    Who’s to say this life isn’t the eternal life?
    The no-time, the hover between in-
    and exhale – both wellspring
    and spur – is the essence of the extra strength
    you use to loosen the screw that holds down
    everything,
    or this morning, the heft I need
    to shuttle from boulder to boulder
    over the slump of rock meant to keep the riverbank
    from moving. …

    From “Breath”

    “[Philips] has a knack for collapsing time and space, tearing the veil, letting the reader slip through the gap to a place of vivid simultaneity.” (The Malahat Review on A Blue with Blood in It).

    Original Publisher: London, Brick Books
    Language(s): English
    Collection(s)/Series: Brick Books Poetry