Like the laundry that greets readers at the start of Anita Lahey's astonishing debut-hanging on clothelines and bodied out in breezes-the poems in Out to Dry in Cape Breton exist in a state of thrumming levitation. Lahey's scampish play with idioms, her accelerated sense of traditional forms, and her omnivorous eye for fresh imagery lead to a poetry constantly streaming with surprises. These are musical, hyperstimulated, shape-shifting poems that draw on their subjects-a high diver, World War I female munitions workers, a ...
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Like the laundry that greets readers at the start of Anita Lahey's astonishing debut-hanging on clothelines and bodied out in breezes-the poems in Out to Dry in Cape Breton exist in a state of thrumming levitation. Lahey's scampish play with idioms, her accelerated sense of traditional forms, and her omnivorous eye for fresh imagery lead to a poetry constantly streaming with surprises. These are musical, hyperstimulated, shape-shifting poems that draw on their subjects-a high diver, World War I female munitions workers, a mangled shopping cart-to conduct inspired, often irreverent, investigations into the marginal details of our world. The collection concludes with a long poem where Lahey's gifts combine to create a large-spirited, unsentimental vision of a Maritime world free of fiddlers and romantic fishing tales: one instead brimming with honesty, humour, paradox, and grit.
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