Guernica Editions

Melanie Janisse's Orioles in the Oranges is the work of a soldier of romance. In a language that enchants as it haunts, Janisse presses herself against the velocity of fate and refuses history's slide into remoteness. Hers is an act of rebellion. She resurrects ancestral ghosts with an archivist's precision, a mourner's yearning, a sensualist's care. She takes lives into her hands - both to examine their ends and to insist on their beginnings.

In this brutally honest debut collection, Melanie Janisse crafts a slow-boiling Southern Ontario thunder to accompany the reader on an emotional migratory path from the delicate swamps of Pelee Island to the vast mud flats of East Vancouver and the hardened, concrete points in between. Janisse's clean and powerful language dredges Lac du Chats for all that's been lost - intentional or otherwise. With astonishing honesty and compassion, Orioles in the Oranges seems to suggest that home is not a house, nor a people, but the series of landscapes that envelope us and call us back over and over again.

Orioles in the Oranges is an exquisitely told story of a destructive modern love, woven together with a famous Métis legend of Pelee Island - involving a young woman who plunged to her death in Lake Erie after being abandoned by her English husband. Janisse's own Metis heritage, as well as her relationship with Detroit's vibrant underground, creates a tone throughout the poems that can only be described as defiant and sensual. The poems are accentuated with some of the areas shipwrecks and tales of rum running and drug smuggling, adding a dark and intriguing texture to the work. Beginning with a quote from Preston Long's famous album 'If I Don't See you on Sunday' (Touch and Go Records) to the final defiant poem in one of Toronto's small dog parks, this collection of writing should not be missed and will easily get under the skin and touch every reader with its intensity and honesty. Excerpts of the book have been published in The Southernmost Review and Northern Poetry Review, the Windsor Review and in 'Gulch' an anthology released with Tightrope Books this fall.