Paperback
978-1-77212-453-8Size: 6" x 9"
Pages: 96
Pages: 80
epub
978-1-77212-642-6Pages: 80
To float, to drown, to close up, to open
Robert Kroetsch Series
By E. Alex Pierce
In this collection, E. Alex Pierce enters the territory of memory embedded in landscape where “language tied to the land” evokes the cadence of tidal rivers and creates a fluid world. She traces the fragmented childhood beginnings that lead to the formation of a young artist who moves from music, through theatre, to poetry. The passionate relationships and complex juxtapositions of art and performance that form an artist’s life find voice here in the symphonic structure of the long poem, the provocative individual prose poems, and the final stretched sonnet sequence that interrogates a lost love, “Still. Shimmering in the morning wind. And gone.” These fiercely poised works are layered and rich, with sensuous attention to line and breath: a major work from an accomplished poet.
And in that space of summer afternoon, the image born of sound
and light inhabits all her blood and bone, the mind ignites. She sees
the fire – space for her is stage now, theatre is the flame. She sees it
burning all the way back to the Sable River, the lamp, the voices,
the two old people, in the dark,
without wall or roof or post
or beam –
and even as her father buries refuse
in the cellar hole, turns all this under, she
seizes it, picks up her torch,
and runs.
—from the title poem
Book details
Publication date: February 2020Series: Robert Kroetsch Series
Keywords: Poetry / Canadian Literature
Subject(s): POETRY / Canadian, Creative Writing, Creative Writing / Poetry, Poetry / Canadian Literature, POETRY / Women Authors, Poetry / Canadian Literature, Poetry, Literature, Poetry
Publisher(s): The University of Alberta Press
Book details
Publication date: February 2020Series: Robert Kroetsch Series
Keywords: Poetry / Canadian Literature
Subject(s): POETRY / Canadian, Creative Writing, Creative Writing / Poetry, Poetry / Canadian Literature, POETRY / Women Authors, Poetry / Canadian Literature, Poetry, Literature, Poetry
Publisher(s): The University of Alberta Press
E. Alex Pierce. E. Alex Pierce, author of Vox Humana, lives in East Sable River, Nova Scotia. She conducts manuscript review workshops throughout Canada, and is Senior Editor at Boularderie Island Press. Pierce holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and for ten years taught Creative Writing at Cape Breton University. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in literary journals. Her most recent publications are Aubade: Poetry and Prose from Nova Scotia Writers (Editor) and Salt and Wild: Shelburne County Anthology (Co-editor).
“Pierce creates movements in the rhythm of the estuary of Sable River, where she grew up, opening, closing up, floating and drowning as consistently as moon directs the tides…. Hers is a poetry of attentiveness, reaching back through the years and into the future without sentimentality…” [Full review at https://freefallmagazine.wordpress.com/2020/09/14/review-of-e-alex-pierces-to-float-to-drown-to-close-up-to-open/]
"We are immersed in Pierce’s baptismal font of words, held deeply, only to emerge into a new air, made over, revived by a poetry of the rarest beauty. 'The Creek' surely is a masterpiece, a world poem created from the cross currents of the heart and the gold-brown waters of the Sable River."
3 To float, to drown…
19 Full Moon
22 The boy. The boy is her beloved.
23 Medway River, Carousel
25 Nothing more lonely
26 The Creek
MĪthan, to conceal
31 A Dug Well
32 Tempest
33 The sky full of empty rooms
35 Bach Prelude: Reprise
36 Mīthan
37 Not wanting it to end
39 The fetch of the wind
40 It is in me forever
41 Vindauga
The Stanzas. Rooms.
44 You want to say the word chemise
47 It could have been that morning
48 The opening, the newness, as if it were now
49 In an afternoon, at your house
50 Not of you. Of the capturing
51 Now, on YouTube, the camera
52 Heat from the photo lamps
53 Enraptured. Christmas morning at your house
54 The two Polish chairs
55 I can still see you, us. Side by side at Logan Airport
56 Every Sunday morning we would set off
57 Something about the dark
58 What were they doing
59 Honey and locusts. A man in pain
60 In this last hour
61 The vulnerability that doesn’t show
62 Should I tell you now
63 Or have we lived it
64 It’s not the heart. It’s the cry
65 Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo
66 We’ve come so far
67 The boards are bare
Coda, Aubade.
71 The way white lilacs
73 Notes
83 Acknowledgements
E. Alex Pierce. E. Alex Pierce, author of Vox Humana, lives in East Sable River, Nova Scotia. She conducts manuscript review workshops throughout Canada, and is Senior Editor at Boularderie Island Press. Pierce holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and for ten years taught Creative Writing at Cape Breton University. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in literary journals. Her most recent publications are Aubade: Poetry and Prose from Nova Scotia Writers (Editor) and Salt and Wild: Shelburne County Anthology (Co-editor).
“Pierce creates movements in the rhythm of the estuary of Sable River, where she grew up, opening, closing up, floating and drowning as consistently as moon directs the tides…. Hers is a poetry of attentiveness, reaching back through the years and into the future without sentimentality…” [Full review at https://freefallmagazine.wordpress.com/2020/09/14/review-of-e-alex-pierces-to-float-to-drown-to-close-up-to-open/]
"We are immersed in Pierce’s baptismal font of words, held deeply, only to emerge into a new air, made over, revived by a poetry of the rarest beauty. 'The Creek' surely is a masterpiece, a world poem created from the cross currents of the heart and the gold-brown waters of the Sable River."
3 To float, to drown…
19 Full Moon
22 The boy. The boy is her beloved.
23 Medway River, Carousel
25 Nothing more lonely
26 The Creek
MĪthan, to conceal
31 A Dug Well
32 Tempest
33 The sky full of empty rooms
35 Bach Prelude: Reprise
36 Mīthan
37 Not wanting it to end
39 The fetch of the wind
40 It is in me forever
41 Vindauga
The Stanzas. Rooms.
44 You want to say the word chemise
47 It could have been that morning
48 The opening, the newness, as if it were now
49 In an afternoon, at your house
50 Not of you. Of the capturing
51 Now, on YouTube, the camera
52 Heat from the photo lamps
53 Enraptured. Christmas morning at your house
54 The two Polish chairs
55 I can still see you, us. Side by side at Logan Airport
56 Every Sunday morning we would set off
57 Something about the dark
58 What were they doing
59 Honey and locusts. A man in pain
60 In this last hour
61 The vulnerability that doesn’t show
62 Should I tell you now
63 Or have we lived it
64 It’s not the heart. It’s the cry
65 Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo
66 We’ve come so far
67 The boards are bare
Coda, Aubade.
71 The way white lilacs
73 Notes
83 Acknowledgements
