Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent
A poetry collection that crosses Indigenous storytelling, scientific imagination, and experimental language. It builds a layered sense of identity, history, and transformation.
Work Information
A dense poetry collection where Indigenous voice meets scientific imagination.
Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent is Liz Howard's debut poetry collection, linking Anishinaabe experience with a contemporary sensibility. Scientific perspective and dream imagery move back and forth in sharp language.
Book Information
- Publisher
- McClelland & Stewart
- Published
- 2015-04-14
- Pages
- 112 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.02 x 0.89 x 20.83 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780771038365
- ISBN-10
- 0771038364
- Price
- 2988 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Mythology & Folk Tales/Fairy Tales
Winner of the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize A stunning debut book of poems from a bold new voice unafraid to engage with the exigencies of our contemporary world. In Liz Howard’s wild, scintillating debut, the mechanisms we use to make sense of our worlds – even our direct intimate experiences of it – come under constant scrutiny and a pressure that feels like love. What Howard can accomplish with language strikes us as electric, a kind of alchemy of perception and catastrophe, fidelity and apocalypse. The waters of Northern Ontario shield country are the toxic origin and an image of potential. A subject, a woman, a consumer, a polluter; an erotic force, a confused brilliance, a very necessary form of urgency – all are loosely tethered together and made somehow to resonate with our own devotions and fears; made “to be small and dreaming parallel / to ceremony and decay.” Liz Howard is what contemporary poetry needs right now.
Liz Howard’s first book of poems, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent , won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, the first time a debut collection has won the award. The book was also a finalist for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Born and raised in northern Ontario, Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in Canadian literary journals such as The Capilano Review , The Puritan , and Matrix Magazine . Her chapbook Skullambient was a finalist for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing through the University of Guelph and works as a research officer in cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto.
Reviews
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Pure Poetry from a First Nation's poetess
I will reads this poem when directed by my Professor of Poetry in Summer School Session at U of C, Dr. Jonathon Wilcke.
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A striking collection of poems
Liz Howard’s Griffin Prize award for “Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent” was something was something of a surprise. This was her first published collection of poems, and her background and university training are not literary – she’s a research officer in cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. She has previously published a chapbook, “Skullambient” (the poems of “Skullambient” are included in “Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent”), and her poetry has appeared in such Canadian literary journals such as The Capilano Review, The Puritan, and Matrix Magazine. The poems in the collection are related and often loop with the same title. She combines nature, time, science, and elements of Canadian native religion into on striking collection of poems. This poem is from the first section in the collection, entitled “Hyperboreal.” A Wake Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss to explain this place you’ve returned to from above; cedar along a broken shore, twisting in a wake of fog. I’ve lived in rooms with others, of no place and no mind trying to bind a self inside the contagion of words while your eyes open the night’s slow static. At a loss to understand all that I cannot say, as if you came upon the infinite simply by thinking and it was a shore of broken cedar twisting in a wake of fog. If I moan from an animal throat it is in hope you will return to me what I lost learning to speak. Your eyes open the night’s slow static at a loss to ever know the true terminus of doubt, the limits of skin. As long as you hold me I am doubled from without and within: a wake of fog unbroken, a shore of twisted cedar. I will press myself into potential, into your breath, and maybe what was lost will return in sleep once I see your eyes open into night’s slow static, at a loss. Broken on a shore of cedar. We twist in a wake of fog. Born and raised in Canada, Howard received her Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto. She recently received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Guelph. The Griffin Prize has established itself as one of the world’s most prestigious (and financially rewarding) prizes in poetry, and the recognition of collections like Howard’s enhances the prize’s reputation.
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There is a circular motion to the book that will haunt you in the most wonderful way.
I return to this collection of poetry again and again for its attention to sound, texture and word play. Howard's thoughtful engagement with ideas surrounding assimilation, decolonization, and feminism is electric. There is a circular motion to the book that will haunt you in the most wonderful way.