her brain explodes like mint rhizomes at the complexity of her day – footlights
I must say, I’ve been on instagram for years but only reading and speaking to people I already know as a closed forum.
Exploring instagram with tags is a free for all, like how early internet felt. No language or distance barriers. No gender. No ruts. Hashtag or word search and you can meet anyone anywhere. I didn’t realize how much I missed that.
I have been having a lot of fun with this, and it’s inspired me to pick up the camera again, and energized me to play with visual design.
This is an addition to the CanLit poetic tradition of sex-at followed by a few (Barry McKinnon, Brian Fawcett, George Stanley, Artie Gold, rob mclennan, Mark Cochrane and Kate Van Dusen) of checking in with how sex is every few years.
sex at 38 ii: I don’t want to wash the sheets. it would lose the kelp the duck potatoes, the fish. I want to wake inside smells of the lake a homeopathic tincture of your sun lotion I know – hope springs infernal idiot and our tomorrow will feel nothing like this. a loss of self but hard to-mow-row is tomorrow’s field of weeds. life’s forwards memory lives backwards from here, now. let me drowse in the scents of muskgrass and yellow pond lilies, believe in how water holds us as we swim.
“I have been known to say that I am not a big fan of ‘sex poetry’. What I really mean is that I am not generally a fan of ‘erotic poetry’, though there have been exceptions. This is the former without being the latter. The sex is there, but it certainly does not mean to titillate, rather… illuminate? Causing you to ruminate? Or maybe just enjoy. This is a very good chapbook by a very good poet. Thanks to rob mclennan for passing this beauty my way. Thanks to Pearl for writing it.” — Rusty Priske on Sex in Sevens
Heather Spears has passed. Wolsak and Wynn did a bunch of her poetry collections including her gg-winning collection The Word for Sand. She won the Pat Lowther 3 times. Northrop Frye called her first book “haunting and disconcerting.”
Last time I saw her was at the Tree Reading Series when she was visiting from Denmark about a decade ago. She was sketching readers. I had no idea who she was. Her sketches were fast and fluid. Naturally enough since she also teaches drawing and had been doing this for decades.
You might recall I read just in February her Line by Line: An anthology of Canadian Poetry, edited and with drawings byHeather Spears.
the quickness travel reduces us to the excretory feeding tubes that we are. baby birds, all of us. dim, too dim to see.
give me a flashlight to glow the pink stretch between the translucent beaks of books.
will mother return? should the food cart not return, should it return empty except for the sound of its one squeaky wheel,
we can’t choke down its good for nothing hollow comfort. we need our faecal sacs carried away. would brass-badged refuse?
Quebec Passages
What People Said:
“Her dry humour just races around inside these poems […] Pirie’s mature poems are Brautiganian whip-smart and as precise as pinched purpose. […] full of wisdom and a little piss and vinegar. Someone confident enough to let loose with those assuring assessments, clinical appraisals and whimsical amusements.” -Michael Dennis on Quebec Passages, February 2015, Today’s Book of Poetry
“Part of the appeal of following Pirie’s work over the past few years has always been in not entirely knowing where her work might go next, shifting between narrative forms into more traditional engagements with haiku as well as more experimental forms of language and visual poetry, playing constantly with different shapes and possible sounds. […] [T]hrough her curiosity, her work manages to accomplish a series of unexpected moments and startling, even jarring, images.”—rob mclennan on Quebec Passages at Small Press Review.”
