The Stag Head Spoke
Short-listed for the Canadian Authors’ Association Poetry Award
The Stag Head Spoke (Wolsak and Wynn/Buckrider Books, 2014) is a hybrid poetic work comprising two “Books” or long poems. The first Book (“Bestiary: The Enfantesques”) comprises a meditation on childhood, language, power and ecology through critical engagement with traditional poetic forms, song forms and children’s literature. The second Book (“For the Suicide of Vespertine: The Figures”) enacts a feminist re-imagining of elegiac subjectivity in the form of an experimental poem-play.
“The Stag Head speaks a wound dilating, herding echoes. Her unfinished voice extending with or without witness, shrapnel plumed. The feeling wants. The monstrous thing held in hand, leaking her features. Turning, it rears between her and her image, and being. Is it a unicorn parted from allegory? Inexhaustible, we follow l’animot call of another throat coming. We decide that this is a gift.”
Rachel Zolf, author of Janey’s Arcadia
- Excerpts from “Act II – For The Suicide of Verpertine; The Figures.” Exile Literary Quarterly 35.4 (2013). 55 – 61.
- “The Shadow” and “Rocking Man.” The Iowa Review 42.3 (2012) 40-41.
- Excerpts from “Act I – The Figures.” filling Station 49 (2010). 40-45.