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In her
much-anticipated eighth collection, Carolyn Marie Souaid distils the complex
emergencies of the everyday with a keen eye, sharp ear and sure hand.
Cycling through themes of aging, dying and the inescapable erosion of
life, her poems are a poignant catalogue of finite moments, a nod to the
“inadequacy of the present” and the “incremental withdrawal” of earthly
things, peppered with insistent, eleventh-hour reminders that what ultimately
matters is not the “finish line” or the “final performance” of a career,
but the human spirit “orbiting the nucleus of time.” Whether it’s the
irony of the Exit sign on a crashed plane or the wind arriving in the
nick of time to depose our received ideas of the world, these poems of
the eleventh hour are bridges connecting life and death, where nothing
and everything matters, the sayable and the unsayable, the necessary and
the futile.
In only sixty-nine pages, not a word wasted, in spare and lucid poetry,
Carolyn Marie Souaid gives us the world, the world calling out, as it
does, for the world. Each line is wisdom, history: personal, familial,
and far beyond, woven essentially, as it must be, from what’s left behind,
from scraps, beautifully. This collection is a harbinger; it is the
eleventh hour, the language so accurate and clear. And yet it is also
a solace, balm for our uneasy twenty-first century hearts.
— Arleen Paré
Carolyn Marie Souaid is the author of seven previous poetry collections.
Her work has been shortlisted for literary awards including the A.M. Klein
Prize for Poetry and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and has been featured
on CBC-Radio. Blood is Blood, a controversial videopoem co-written
with Endre Farkas, garnered a top prize at the 2012 Zebra Poetry Film
Festival in Berlin. Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik (Baraka
Books, 2017), her debut novel exploring the aftermath of colonization
in a fictional community of Northern Quebec, won the Silver Medal for
Regional Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards in New York.
She lives in Montreal, where she counsels Inuit students attending John
Abbott College.
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