LITMIR.BIZ

2007 Winner of the Pat Lowther Award and a Lambda Literary Award As meditative practices focus on the axis of breath, these poems focus on the moment of action, of thought, on the flux of speech. This is a poetry not of snapshots or collages but of long-exposed captures of the not-so-still lives of women. One sequence imagines Virginia Woolf’s childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, ‘On the Scent,’ makes us flâneurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while ‘The River Is All Thumbs’ uses a palette of vibrant repetition to ‘paint’ a landscape. Queyras’s language – astute, insistent, languorous – repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do we make a moment firm? These ‘postmodern,’ ‘postfeminist’ poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end? Sina Queyras's latest collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford and Concordia University in Montreal where she now resides.

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Where were you when you first read <i>Ariel</i>? Who were you? What has changed in your life? In the lives of women? In <i>My Ariel</i>, Sina Queyras barges into one of the iconic texts of the twentieth century, with her own family baggage in tow, exploring and exploding the cultural norms, forms, and procedures that frame and contain the lives of women.

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"Sina Queyras is a poet to read and reckon with."&#8212; Lambda Literary Review MxT , or «Memory x Time,» is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over in their hands, by invoking other poets, by appropriating science, by studying the history of elegy. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful. All the gods know is destinations. I have raisedA glass, my eye, your hook. Let's face it the worldIs a shrinking place and hungry: too much griefTo feed. I float away from you on hard Covers. I step out on the stacked hours. WordsIf they were soil how I would throw them back into theCompost pile and wait for spring. Those «this is howIt is,» speeches appear and later diamonds soft as bullets. I went to the library looking to scaffold my thoughts.Sure, now you say Lucretius. Intelligence is so oftenHindsight. Outside Holly Golightly's townhouseThere are taxis. The end of me, or you, is of no concern. Frederick Seidel anoints me with the head of his penis.It is soft as a chamois and spreads like egg across my scalp. Sina Queyras is the author of the Lambda Award&#8211;winning Lemon Hound , Expressway (shortlisted for the Governor General's Award), and the novel Autobiography of Childhood (shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award). She often writes for the Poetry Foundation and runs the online journal Lemon Hound (Lemonhound.com).

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This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice. Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi. Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky. Expressway exposes the paradox of modern mobility: the more roads and connections we build, the more separate we feel. Sina Queyras has written a bravely lyrical critique of our ethical and ecological imprint, a legacy easily blamed on corporations and commerce, but one we've allowed, through our tacit acquiescence, to overwhelm us. Every brush stroke, every bolt, and nut, every form and curve in our networks of oil and rubber, every thought and its material outcome &#150; each decision can make or unmake us.

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