literary suburbia

Posted by Daniela Elza on Mar 22 2018

My poem serving time (in the burbs II is forthcoming in The Puritan‘s, Literary Suburbia Supplement (April, 2018).
I love saying the title of this poem. I might have to write a few more poems in this series. The first, the original, serving time (in the burbs found its home in the weight of dew (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2012). There were a good number of reviews that the weight of dew book inspired. Here is a lovely surprise review by Jess Wind in raspberry magazine, in which she travels backwards toward Vancouver. Thank you, Jess, for this delightful review that reminded me again how to love my book even more.

One of my favourite (and more philosophical) reviews was by Dr. Hilary Turner (who teaches English and Rhetoric at the University of the Fraser Valley). It came out in the Pacific Rim Review of Books (Issue 18, Vol. 9, No. 1), July, 2013.

Unfortunately, the review is not available online, so here are three excerpted quotes:

In the weight of dew, [Elza] explores the BC Interior with the eyes and ears of a traveller who is familiar with the unfamiliar, and who cannot wait to try out the sound of words in spaces where they will resonate differently, or where geography may impose a grammar of its own.

“…for it is word-play of a specific kind that interests Elza. As Wittgenstein famously said, “words are deeds.” Elza concurs, and adds that they can be objects too, both animate and inanimate. The plainest example of her use of this complex device occurs in ‘alternate grammars’ where the speaker discovered ‘a stylized calligraphy’ in the grass of a hillside and uses this script not merely to write her name, but to become the thing she has written.”

“As a shore is a kind of a line, and as a line (of verse) can shore up our knowledge of a place, these poems render their setting all the more palpable for their attention to the effects of language upon experience. The paradox is one that has preoccupied modern philosophy at least since Nietzsche, and Elza is a most philosophic traveller, leaving the place she has visited not untouched but illuminated.”

Much gratitude to all who spend time with my words, and take the time to write a few words themselves to tell what my poems carry across, how they traverse the spaces between us with the imperfect tools of language.

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