BUOYANCY CONTROL, the latest collection of poems from Vancouverite Adrienne Gruber, presents a fascinating culmination of land and sea, mind and body, in linguistic form. Metaphors of oceans, lakes, and other bodies of water (as well as the creatures that inhabit those spaces), swim and swirl their way through Gruber''s languid poems, which are divided into two evocative sections that explore themes of sexuality, sexual identity, and queerness, while confronting the feelings of loss and longing found in relationships, and the chance glimpse into a new life, while still recovering from a painfully failed connection. BUOYANCY CONTROL is an honest, at times humorous, and revealing look inside the mind and body of a woman manoeuvring through experiences of longing, loss, and the fluidity of sexual identity, presented in a powerfully feminist and unapologetic poetic voice, from one of Canada''s most promising young writers. "Akin to the Indonesian mimic octopus, the poems in BUOYANCY CONTROL ''ascend from the ocean floor,'' and proceed to evolve with an uncommon beauty. Both starkly sexual and aposematic, Adrienne Gruber''s second book is remarkably controlled, framing the human condition in a world that''s constantly shifting. Buoyancy Control is a fearless collection from one of Canada''s best emerging poets."Jim Johnstone "Densely, disturbingly erotic, Adrienne Gruber''s BUOYANCY CONTROL is not a book for the faint of heart. Gruber''s erotic reach encompasses the world entire, from undersea creatures to the human body of the beloved.
No Hallmark sweetness in this collectionhere is a fierce, wet, pulsing hunger, though there is an acute sensitivity in these observations, whether of childbirth, cold-water swimming, or other moments of convulsion and transformation so powerful that they transcend intellect. Here are poems that burst like fireworks, ''all thought blasted into the night sky.''"Rachel Rose "The lust and loneliness that muscle us between open water and inky depth vie for power in BUOYANCY CONTROL. Gruber''s poems consume aqua life, roadkill, citrus, hotel beds, and dock-edge gargoyles as fuel for ''spit-shined'' words that surface as moans and as ''sharp, atomized shrieks.'' Plaintive, ecstatic, carnal, these pieces often wonder whether we''re ''complete on our own,'' while veering between the urgency of self-pleasure, the defensiveness of self-containment, and the wound of self-reflexivity. Plumbing the digestive debris that skates the sea floor, Gruber''s poems muck about with our equilibrium. We rise and sink lured by shadowscapes, pleasurelands and the hunt for a healthy gravity."Brecken Hancock Literary Nonfiction.
Memoir. HER PARAPHERNALIA, the new book of creative non-fiction from Canadian poet Margaret Christakos, presents an intimate and original collection of midlife writings that seeks to make readers think in a very personalized way about family geneology, private sexuality and life changes, including those experiences that exist at the intersections of contemporary digital culture. Christakos''s virtuosity with language and wordplay tantalizes through a sequence of ten études (consisting of entre-genre pieces, including prose and lyric poetry, experimental writing that integrates elements of social media posts, and other forms) that explore women''s and girls'' relationships to self-portraiture in the Digital Age, and considers aspects of how we negotiate our public and private identities as women, mothers, and daughters. Christakos wrote HER PARAPHERNALIA as a love song to her mother and daughter. As such, the collection is at once a personal and yet wholly personable entrée into major themes that many people of all ages and stages can relate toself-identity, the beauty of the selfie, partnership, divorce, miscarriage, menstruation, sexual lust, solo travel, depression, menopause, the death of a parent, the writing life, and women''s transgenerational vitality, among others. "Easily one of our most daring, consistently inventive and deeply engaged contemporary Canadian poets."rob mclennan "In Christakos''s work the public and private are emphatically not separate. Multitudes provides readers with a poetics well tuned to rearticulate an insistently present tense.
"Jason Weins.