Poetry. As meditative practices focus on the axis of breath, these poems focus on the moment of action, of thought, on the flux of speech. This is a poetry not of snapshots or collages but of long-exposed captures of the not-so-still lives of women. One sequence imagines Virginia Woolf's childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, "On the Scent," makes us voyeurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while "The River Is All Thumbs" uses a palette of vibrant repetition to "paint" a landscape. Queyras's language--astute, insistent, languorous--repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do we make a moment form? These "postmodern," "postfeminist" poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end?

Author City: Montreal, QC CAN

Sina Queyras is the author most recently of the poetry collections LEMON HOUND and EXPRESSWAY. She has lived across Canada, in New Jersey, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia. She lives and teaches in Montreal.

Reviews and Other Links
http://www.constantcritic.com/jordan_davis/lemon_hound/
http://versemag.blogspot.com/2007/05/new-review-of-sina-queryas.html