heft
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: Mar 26, 2019
Language: eng
Format: paperback
Number of pages: 120
ISBN-13: 9780771005596
Description: "From Toronto-based poet and editor Doyali Islam comes an intimate, luminous collection of poems that investigate the ruptures in our relationships. How does one inhabit a world in which the moon and the drone hang in the same sky? How can one be at home in one's own body in the presence of suspected autoimmune illness, severe chronic/recurrent pain, and a society that bears down with a particular construct of normal female sexual experience? What might a daughter salvage within a fraught relationship with a cancer-stricken father? Uncannily at ease with both high lyricism and formal innovation and invention, the poems in heft and sing are unafraid to lift up and investigate burdens and ruptures of all kinds--psychic, social, cultural, physical, and political--while also embodying notions of alignment and constraint. Providing continuity over the poet's visually-arresting forms--including Islam's self-termed split sonnets, double sonnets, and parallel poems--is allied remembrance of the resilience of the Palestinian people. Yet, the work doesn't always stray far from home, with a triad of astro-poems that weave together myth and memory. Here is a poet small in stature, unwilling to abandon to silence small histories, small life forms, and the small courages and beauties of the ordinary hour. In these deftly wrought poems, the spirit of the everyday and the spirit of witness bind fiercely to one another. heft and sing is a ledger of tenderness, survival, and risk."--