About this item
Highlights
- Winner of the 2015 Governor General's Award for PoetryWinner of the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for PoetryIn My Shoes are Killing Me, poet Robyn Sarah reflects on the passing of time, the fleetingness of dreams, and the bittersweet pleasure of thinking on the "hazardous . . . treasurehouse" that is the past.
- Governor General's Literary Awards (Poetry) 2015 1st Winner
- About the Author: Robyn Sarah is the author of nine previous poetry collections, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays on poetry.
- 64 Pages
- Poetry, Canadian
Description
About the Book
"things we didn't do, and never will,queue upon the wires like birds
and wing off, one by one."
Book Synopsis
Winner of the 2015 Governor General's Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry
In My Shoes are Killing Me, poet Robyn Sarah reflects on the passing of time, the fleetingness of dreams, and the bittersweet pleasure of thinking on the "hazardous . . . treasurehouse" that is the past. Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collection from one of Canada's most well-regarded poets.
Robyn Sarah is the author of nine previous collections. Ten of her poems have appeared on The Writer's Almanac, and her work has been anthologized in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005), and The Bedford Introduction to Literature (2001).
Review Quotes
Praise for My Shoes are Killing Me
"So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience."--Eric Ormsby
"The cool delight of her poetry is to turn those subjects of routine forgetfulness into words that quiver in the heart ... Sarah knows the language: its pressure points, its traditions, its crevices. Trained as a musician, she also understands flow and timing, when to sing and when to keep silent."--Montreal Gazette
"The vigour gets into Sarah's rhythms and rhymes, as always, but they play here against a melancholic sense, as in blues music."--Canadian Literature
"Her precise descriptive siftings...promote a vision of abundance as composed of luminous bits and pieces that never take up more room than they need."--Arc Poetry Magazine
"[Robyn Sarah's] concerns haven't changed. But her eye on "the beginning of dwindle"--an already oft-quoted mantra from her title poem--has her probing them here with a new urgency, even a kind of abandon. The 'nine movements' that make up "My Feet Are Killing Me" rally defiantly and almost joyfully against that dwindling"--Anita Lahey, The Fiddlehead
"[Sarah's] biggest gift is her ability to weave a number of complex themes into a seemingly straightforward yarn ... She can take a perfectly ordinary event and transform it into something magical. Again and again."--New Canadian Magazine
"Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collections from one of Canada's most well-regarded poets."--49th Shelf
"As [Wallace] Stevens writes in The Plain Sense of Things, 'The absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined.' Robyn Sarah is one of our poet's in Canada who has attended most readily and vigorously to this hard work, and we are forever indebted to her for it."--Jeweller's Eye
Praise for My Shoes are Killing Me
"So assured and musical is the hand that shaped them that these poems tend to memorize themselves, as though they had always formed part of our experience."--Eric Ormsby
"The cool delight of her poetry is to turn those subjects of routine forgetfulness into words that quiver in the heart ... Sarah knows the language: its pressure points, its traditions, its crevices. Trained as a musician, she also understands flow and timing, when to sing and when to keep silent."--Montreal Gazette
"The vigour gets into Sarah's rhythms and rhymes, as always, but they play here against a melancholic sense, as in blues music."--Canadian Literature
"Her precise descriptive siftings...promote a vision of abundance as composed of luminous bits and pieces that never take up more room than they need."--Arc Poetry Magazine
"[Robyn Sarah's] concerns haven't changed. But her eye on "the beginning of dwindle"--an already oft-quoted mantra from her title poem--has her probing them here with a new urgency, even a kind of abandon. The 'nine movements' that make up "My Feet Are Killing Me" rally defiantly and almost joyfully against that dwindling"--Anita Lahey, The Fiddlehead
"[Sarah's] biggest gift is her ability to weave a number of complex themes into a seemingly straightforward yarn ... She can take a perfectly ordinary event and transform it into something magical. Again and again."--New Canadian Magazine
"Natural, musical, meditative, warm, and unexpectedly funny, this is a restorative and moving collections from one of Canada's most well-regarded poets."--49th Shelf
"As [Wallace] Stevens writes in The Plain Sense of Things, 'The absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined.' Robyn Sarah is one of our poet's in Canada who has attended most readily and vigorously to this hard work, and we are forever indebted to her for it."--Jeweller's Eye
About the Author
Robyn Sarah is the author of nine previous poetry collections, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays on poetry. Her writing has appeared widely in the United States, the UK, and Canada, and her poems have been anthologized in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005), The Bedford Introduction to Literature (2001), Modern Canadian Poets (Carcanet, 2011), and Fifteen Canadian Poets (Oxford, 2001).