Stock - by Jennifer Bowering DeLisle (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Laughing woman eating salad" humorous and ironic feminist dialogue with stock photography.

In her job as an instruction designer, Jennifer Bowering Delisle regularly sourced stock photography and became fascinated by these images' distinct aesthetic: their unusual camera angles, pronounced colour filtering, and heavy-handed and often bizarre visual metaphors. She set off to give voice to the silent women that recur in these images, and to enter into dialogue with them.

As a low-cost source of millions of images, stock databases provide a significant number of the images used in advertising, publishing, and other media. This ubiquity means that stock's contrived poses and distinct look are instantly familiar - and reinforce and shape biases, privilege, and stereotypes.

From found poems using metadata and keywords, to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like "Good Mother Morning Family Happy," "Beautiful Woman Eating Salad," and "Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded," Delisle's ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography's clichés and delight in all of its strangeness.

Review Quotes

Deriving is a masterfully crafted collection that is both prescient and relevant. Delisle traverses time, language, geography, and topography and deftly synthesizes the ethereal and the concrete with poems that 'sound the shape of a thousand leaves.' Delisle's lens zooms in and out from the internal workings of motherhood, family, and love, even as it brings into focus etymology, biology, climate change, and politics. Above all, this collection is a magical exploration of language's perfection and elusiveness. Here is a voice that enlightens, surprises, and stirs. Deriving is rich―its breadth and depth compel the reader to experience poetry that, at its core, is about 'finding words/for everything I'll never understand.'" - Wendy McGrath, Recurring Fictions

About the Author

Jennifer Bowering Delisle's collection of lyric essays, Micrographia (2023), won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. She is also the author of Deriving, a collection of poetry (2021), and The Bosun Chair, a lyric family memoir (2017). She is on the board of NeWest Press and lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.