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Not In Vain You've Sent Me Light
Guernica Editions, Spring 2021
90 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771836111
ISBN10: 1771836113
English
$20.00 Canada, $17.95 US, £9.95 UK
Read more from the Essential Poets Series
Not in Vain You've Sent Me Light begins with a provocative, sometimes humorous exposé of two lovers and their collisions and triumphs,
and evolves into a high-voltage portrait gallery, depicting heroes and artists, scientists and politicians, mothers and their conflicted daughters. Cora Siré draws on a multi-dimensional palette to deepen her exploration of identity, displacement and the cosmic powers of love and art.
He loathes French's / won't touch the stuff. / Where he grew up / the mustard isn't neon bright / but rusty as the cordillera / zingy on your lips -- / a bee sting at first taste.
Light can be a sunflower. And light can be yellow mustard. “It’s in the bruises the charcoal smudge of shadows … a whirl of prismic colours,” Cora Siré writes, as she uncovers moments of intimacy and connection, colour and joy, beauty and light in the private, political, and historically fraught wounds of life. The perceptive speaker in these poems stretches herself towards a sense of global inclusion in the local, searching for belonging by existing in rather than travelling through physical and psychic geographies of poetry.
Klara du Plessis, author of Hell Light Flesh and Ekke
Siré uses memory as a bridge to realization, and subtle humour as a path to truth rather than a way to allude it. Her words dig into the depths of people’s identities – ourselves, lovers, family and friends, strangers – to discover how much we can only guess at or what we might never know even over the course of a lifetime.
Robyn Fadden, The Montreal Review of Books
Cora Siré’s Not in Vain You’ve Sent Me Light is a lush and compelling collection of poetry. Here, everyday scenarios and even condiments linger vividly in the reader’s mind. Siré’s poetry is a moveable feast: We are treated to compelling portraits of historical and contemporary figures, including Rubin Carter and Uruguayan poet, Delmira Agustini. We are whisked from a couple’s first tentative encounters together – scars and all – to a whole array of settings. Not in Vain You’ve Sent Me Light is “a multi-coloured manifesto of love,” witty, charming, and filled with masterfully crafted verse.
Greg Santos, author of Ghost Face and Blackbirds
Reviews
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Not In Vain You've Sent Me Light
Robyn Fadden, The Montreal Review of Books - July 8, 2021
Books by Cora Siré
