Carolyn Marie Souaid

The Eleventh Hour

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In her much-anticipated eighth collection, Carolyn Marie Souaid distils the complex emergencies of the everyday with a keen eye, sharp ear and sure hand. Cycling through themes of aging, dying and the inescapable erosion of life, her poems are a poignant catalogue of finite moments, a nod to the “inadequacy of the present” and the “incremental withdrawal” of earthly things, peppered with insistent, eleventh-hour reminders that what ultimately matters is not the “finish line” or the “final performance” of a career, but the human spirit “orbiting the nucleus of time.” Whether it’s the irony of the Exit sign on a crashed plane or the wind arriving in the nick of time to depose our received ideas of the world, these poems of the eleventh hour are bridges connecting life and death, where nothing and everything matters, the sayable and the unsayable, the necessary and the futile.

In only sixty-nine pages, not a word wasted, in spare and lucid poetry, Carolyn Marie Souaid gives us the world, the world calling out, as it does, for the world. Each line is wisdom, history: personal, familial, and far beyond, woven essentially, as it must be, from what’s left behind, from scraps, beautifully. This collection is a harbinger; it is the eleventh hour, the language so accurate and clear. And yet it is also a solace, balm for our uneasy twenty-first century hearts.
— Arleen Paré

Carolyn Marie Souaid is the author of seven previous poetry collections. Her work has been shortlisted for literary awards including the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and has been featured on CBC-Radio. Blood is Blood, a controversial videopoem co-written with Endre Farkas, garnered a top prize at the 2012 Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik (Baraka Books, 2017), her debut novel exploring the aftermath of colonization in a fictional community of Northern Quebec, won the Silver Medal for Regional Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards in New York. She lives in Montreal, where she counsels Inuit students attending John Abbott College.


ISBN 978-1-77171-400-6
Poetry
69 pages
6 x 9
$23.95
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