Welcome to Litsy!

Another Friday, another video summing up the books I‘ve read this week. Sci-fi, queer sci-fi, AI, audiobooks, poetry, comics and more! https://youtu.be/qhyfHlGoQj8

This poetry collection certainly deserves the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ emerging writers it was awarded in 2021. Jillian Christmas, a queer Canadian poet of Tobagonian heritage, writes about big & small things: mental illness & bike theft. A grandmother‘s bafflement that her remarks about the narrator being overweight could be construed as hurtful. Sparkling titles like: “the woman is made of eyes & she got a tornado running up her spine.”

now you tell your jokes for a living
and give away your sadness for free

I turned around and you were gone

pink yukon sunsets
stretch so late that skies miss night
I miss you like that

From the poem entitled "black feminist" (which is my favourite in the collection so far):

"as long as I don't remind anyone where so many of the ideas
for this movement came from anyway
no one likes a know-it-all
and yes even inn this progress someone has got to play the fuel

all of us have to make ourselves useful
and surely no one has yet forgotten how sweetly and happily
dark bodies take to making kindling"

An amazing and beautiful collection of poems. They very much feel like their roots are in slam poetry but totally work on the page. Inventive lyricism and images that go straight to your heart and gut. Like: "What dainty fish-hooks have danced in your heart / dangling the whimpering shadow of which sadness / what tiny worries." The poems are alternately sad, sexy, funny, and angry. There were many times when I gasped out loud and just sat in awe.