{"product_id":"letters-in-a-bruised-cosmos-isbn-9780771037573","title":"Letters in a Bruised Cosmos","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe latest from the author of the Griffin Poetry Prize Award-winning collection\u003ci\u003e Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eGRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE, FINALIST\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTRILLIUM BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY, FINALIST\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eI have to believe my account will outpace its ending.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe danger and necessity of living with each other is at the core of Liz Howard’s daring and intimate second collection. \u003ci\u003eLetters in a Bruised Cosmos\u003c\/i\u003e asks who do we become after the worst has happened? Invoking the knowledge histories of Western and Indigenous astrophysical science, Howard takes us on a breakneck river course of radiant and perilous survival in which we are invited to “reforge [ourselves] inside tomorrow’s humidex”. Everyday observation, family history, and personal tragedy are sublimated here in a propulsive verse that is relentlessly its own. Part autobiography, part philosophical puzzlement, part love song, \u003ci\u003eLetters in a Bruised Cosmos\u003c\/i\u003e is a book that once read will not soon be forgotten.  \u003cbr\u003e Praise for \u003ci\u003eLetters in a Bruised Cosmos\u003c\/i\u003e and Liz Howard: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Responding to astrophysical evidence of a potential collision between the known universe and a parallel universe, the poems in Liz Howard’s powerful collection trace this ‘cosmic bruise’ as it recurs like an epigenetic expression in family history, intergenerational trauma, and the phenomena of everyday life. Like dark matter in the bloodstream, or the star-shaped cells in the brain and spinal cord, the poet carries this vestige within her, observing its shape as a present absence in the spilled ashes of her Indigenous father, or in dissociative childhood experiences of abjection, or in meditations on cognition and Indigenous cosmology. The poems in \u003ci\u003eLetters in a Bruised Cosmos\u003c\/i\u003e are intimate, astonishing, and moving caresses of the bruise the past makes within and around us, marking the many ways in which ‘history is a sewing motion \/ along a thin membrane’.” —Judges' Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Liz Howard’s \u003ci\u003eLetters in a Bruised Cosmos\u003c\/i\u003e stands as yet another masterpiece of orality and temporality in the blossoming oeuvre that is her poetic arena. We traverse through webbed histories, a multiplicity of singing bodies: human, non-human, father, lover, lake, land, galactic. Howard’s ability to unearth creation and trickster from beneath the rubble of canonic and catatonic poetics is a miracle in the making. It is no surprise to be met with yet again grace and fury in \u003ci\u003eLetters in a Bruised Cosmos\u003c\/i\u003e—as Howard has demonstrated time and time again, she is a divining starwalker of a poet.” —Joshua Whitehead, author of \u003ci\u003eJonny Appleseed\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “In \u003ci\u003eLetters in a Bruised Cosmos\u003c\/i\u003e, Liz Howard makes sentences with the elegance and mystery of a sculptor. Howard’s aesthetic mode is a beautiful synthesis of feminist, anti-colonial, and post-structural traditions of critique and re-imagination that is singularly hers. I read each poem with the faith that I would land somewhere I couldn’t have known existed until I opened this book. That’s the mark of poetic genius. I loved this book with my whole body.” —Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of \u003ci\u003eA History of My Brief Body\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Seeking abandon that is not abandonment, in an age when all ambient temperature seems bleak site of wind not warmth, these poems glow. Liz Howard’s cosmos is yes a difficult ongoingness, yet one that gifts bright with language. She creates poetry I can inhabit, touched by parents and their kilter of wildness, inheritor of caps and nail clippers, where spirit demeanours howl from streets and apartments in verbs from science and secular trees. If poetry’s red coals can’t help but expose life’s ashes, it’s in the light from stars. In Howard’s poems, visibility and viability enact an uncoded, recoded boreality, a DNA renewed. Here poems contain the possibility of all states of affairs. Even as the ‘natural’ of speech de-natures, grates, is rendered as remnant and ruin— with the poet we ‘pursue the future\/ pulling dawn through\/ through the needle\/ point of compass north.’ Reading these poems, we are as rare and beautiful as Howard is, extending them to us.” —Erín Moure, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Elements\u003c\/i\u003eLIZ HOWARD’s debut collection\u003ci\u003e Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent\u003c\/i\u003e won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for poetry, and was named a \u003ci\u003eGlobe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e top 100 book. Her poetry has appeared in \u003ci\u003eCanadian Art, The Fiddlehead, Poetry Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eBest Canadian Poetry 2018\u003c\/i\u003e. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.  \u003cbr\u003e SETTLER—ANISHINAABEKWE—NOLI TURBARE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBeauty is my irreparable eye\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e and today I became geometric.\u003cbr\u003e                                         \u003cbr\u003e A faux linear figure that distills \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e a skip trace of first principles.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In a whiteout of Atlantic snow, \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e banging stars into the femoral vein\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e of Euclid while rows of lavender \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e circuits, all porous, surrounded me.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I genuflected before the hospital\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e parking lot of my father’s jaundice,\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e for I am a good daughter\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e of the colony. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The colony which begot \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e the immortal heart of the markets. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Resources nursed all young bucks \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e of the florets, a liquidity I should service \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e or else receive a lesser dessert.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e With my smudge cleanse at the ready \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I find myself dispensing with the usual\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e future haunt of resilience. A survival \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e signalling my relationship to time, \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e or am I out of it entirely?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Come polygon and I circumvent \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e the disaster, \u003ci\u003edo not disturb my circles\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Holy I went, holy all around my head, \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e the holy I am went careening\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e down the back stairs of this low-rise \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e rental. Striated by the pinnacle light \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e of this city that has my blood pooled \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e purple at the center of its gravity. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e You can scan the ground from overhead \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e for death pits. I read this on the internet \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e when I was dehydrated, lonely, and afraid.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Office plants became the broad-leafed \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e repositories for my cognition’s fated heart.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I’ve gone and been abominable. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e A column extended from the top \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e of my head into heaven. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e At the edges of my system \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e an Anishinabek or Indo-European \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e projection of words my nerves \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e could translate into the crawlspace\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e of animal magnetism. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e White pine verticals send us up\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e as a stomach pumped by filial love. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Oh, inconsequent curb of my street\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I refuse to kneel. This day like any other.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Plush pockets of rust about another \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e falsehood of water, a creek that pleats.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I’ve gone and got a blister. That summer \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e a black bear’s muzzle got coated\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e in shellac from the aerosol can she bit \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e through on my mother’s porch at the edge\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e of the forest. Four generations ago,\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e my great-grandmother said, don’t ever\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e shoot a black bear, they are my people.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Makwa, makwa from the north shore.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Before I continue to speak more than this\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e mortuary sunrise where I am only just alive. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Boozhoo.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Aaniin.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Hello.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Today is over. \u003cbr\u003e  ","brand":"McClelland \u0026 Stewart","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233331359973,"sku":"NP9780771037573","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780771037573.jpg?v=1767731373","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/letters-in-a-bruised-cosmos-isbn-9780771037573","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}