Out to Dry in Cape Breton

By Anita Lahey

Like the laundry that greets readers at the start of Anita Lahey's astonishing debut-hanging on clothelines and bodied out in breezes-the poems in Out to Dry in Cape Breton exist in a state of thrumming levitation. Lahey's scampish play with idioms, her accelerated sense of traditional forms, and her omnivorous eye for fresh imagery lead to a poetry constantly streaming with surprises. These are musical, hyperstimulated, shape-shifting poems that draw on their subjects-a high diver, World War I female munitions workers, a mangled shopping cart-to conduct inspired, often irreverent, investigations into the marginal details of our world. The collection concludes with a long poem where Lahey's gifts combine to create a large-spirited, unsentimental vision of a Maritime world free of fiddlers and romantic fishing tales: one instead brimming with honesty, humour, paradox, and grit.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1550652095
• ISBN13: 9781550652093
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Vehicule Press
• Length: 80 Pages