Works by
Sina Queyras
(Writer)

• Slip (2001)
  Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Sappho and Rumi, Marilyn Hacker and Dionne Brand, Slip, Sina Queyras's first book of poetry, is both an examination of the nature of love and an exploration of form. Contrasting the extreme, excessive, and obsessive nature of physical love-how the lover loses herself and like the worst addict is able to justify anything for one more touch-with the often-harsh reality of those choices, Queyras has created a breathless, beautiful and powerful work of rare and raw honesty. Love dissolves time, blurs landscapes, and morphs our world, she says. The Question is not only how can we live this deeply with our lover on a daily basis, but how can we not experience each moment so completely? Slip slides with these questions in a sensuous engagement with language, spilling over with images of clarity and lustrous depth.

• Teethmarks (2004)
  Teethmarks offers a cutting examination of contemporary society, from the personal to the global. The "fuzzy" simplicity of childhood at the book's outset is deftly shadowed by details of cigarette butts in the girl's room, the scent of burning leaves and teeth marks on Barbie dolls (From the dog, Terry assures her, when he was a puppy.) From there on in, Queyras embarks on a dynamic exploration of form in poems sharply aware of shifting boundaries, groundlessness, the seedy pastoral of childhood and the difficulty of maintaining community and family in our increasingly fragmented lives. Teeth Marks merges lives constructed by B-movies and the daily news, transposing their black-and-white "realities" with palettes of vital colour.

• Lemon Hound (2006) -- Winner, 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
  As meditative practices focus on the axis of breath, these poems focus on the moment of action, of thought, on the flux of speech.
  
  This is a poetry not of snapshots or collages but of long-exposed captures of the not-so-still lives of women. One sequence imagines Virginia Woolf’s childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, ‘On the Scent,’ makes us flâneurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while ‘The River Is All Thumbs’ uses a palette of vibrant repetition to ‘paint’ a landscape.
  
  Queyras’s language – astute, insistent, languorous – repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do we make a moment firm? These ‘postmodern,’ ‘postfeminist’ poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end?

• Autobiography of Childhood (In progress)
  An excerpt from this  novel-in-progress, appeared in translation in the French literary journal Siecle 21 in 2006.

See also:

• Open Field: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Poets (2005), Sina Queyras, ed.
  Included here are Christian Bök, Anne Carson, and Erin Mouré, whose experiments with genre have landed them international acclaim; Lisa Robertson and Ken Babstock, whose explorations of the pastoral and the sonnet, respectively, reach as far back into poetry's history as they do into the future of those forms; George Eliot Clark, whose striking lyrics have been adapted for opera; and Tim Lilburn, Don McKay and Jan Zwicky, who have reinvented some of poetry's primordial components from the wilder fringes of the Canadian landscape.
  
  Along with Nicole Brossard, Dionne Brand, Christopher Dewdney, Susan Goyette, Dennis Lee, Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, Fred Wah, and others, these poets have been carefully chosen to convey the exhilarating commotion and diversity of Canadian verse. For native readers, Open Field represents a handy selection of some of their country's most vibrant writers, both established and emergent; for readers in the United States and elsewhere, it is the perfect introduction to the skill and daring ubiquitous in Canadian poetry today.