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river woman

Katherena Vermette author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada

Published:11th Oct '18

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

river woman cover

REVIEW COPIES:

  • Publishers Weekly
  • Booklist
  • Kirkus Reviews
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    Awardwinning Metis poet and acclaimed novelist Katherena Vermette's second collection, river woman, explores her relationship to nature - its destructive power and beauty, its timelessness, and its place in human history.

    Governor General’s Award–winning Métis poet and acclaimed novelist Katherena Vermette’s second collection, river woman, explores her relationship to nature — its destructive power and beauty, its timelessness, and its place in human history.

    Award-winning Métis poet and novelist Katherena Vermette’s second book of poetry, river woman, examines and celebrates love as decolonial action. Here love is defined as a force of reclamation and repair in times of trauma, and trauma is understood to exist within all times. The poems are grounded in what feels like an eternal present, documenting moments of clarity that lift the speaker (and reader) out of the illusion of linear experience. This is what we mean when we describe a work of art as being timeless.

    Like the river they speak to, these poems return again and again to the same source in search of new ways to reconstruct what has been lost. Vermette suggests that it’s through language and the body ― particularly through language as it lives inside the body ― that a fragmented self might resurface as once again whole. This idea of breaking apart and coming back together is woven throughout the collection as the speaker contemplates the ongoing negotiation between the city, the land, and the water, and as she finds herself falling into trust with the ones she loves.

    Vermette honours the river as a woman ― her destructive power and beauty, her endurance, and her stories. These poems sing from a place where “words / transcend ceremony / into everyday” and “nothing / is inanimate.”

These spare, imagistic poems live up to the words of the Vietnamese spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh, quoted in an epigraph: ‘If our hearts are big, we can be like the river. * Toronto Star *
A book that is at once deeply personal and politically charged. * Quill and Quire *
Vermette’s new collection is a strong follow-up to her Governor General’s Award-winning debut, 2012’s North End Love Songs. * Winnipeg Free Press *

ISBN: 9781487003463

Dimensions: 215mm x 139mm x 10mm

Weight: 140g

112 pages