Description
Book SynopsisWinner, J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award
In this experimental long poem sequence, Alyda Faber transforms the portrait poem into runic shapes, ice shelved, sculpted, louvered on a winter shoreline. Twenty years after her mother’s death, Faber untethers herself from the mother she thinks she knows with wild analogies: depicting her mother variously as King Lear’s Kent, a Camperdown elm, a black-capped chickadee, Neil Peart, Pope Innocent X, and a funnel spider.
While embodying the passionate relationship between mother and daughter, Faber’s poems also expose the thorn in the flesh — the inability of mother and daughter to give each other what they most want to give. Endlessly discovered, yet ultimately unknowable, the poet’s mother is complex, mystifying, and unwavering: courageous in her decision to leave all that she knew behind; bewildering in her fidelity to a damaging marriage; steadfast in her devotion to a God who is at once adamant and the source of ephemeral beauty.
Trade Review“Each poem in
Poisonous If Eaten Raw is a portrait and an ecosystem that makes meaning from memory and of a relationship that is the origin of longing and is singular to each of us. How do we make sense of our mothers? The pain they endured, the pain they created? This is a poet pushing past memory into a present and deeper understanding that’s brimming with empathy and a way forward. And this is remembering in motion: vivid and audacious, moving into and out from its source.” -- Sue Goyette
“There is no way for a daughter to know her mother as anyone other than a mother. But in
Poisonous if Eaten Raw, Faber creates evocative portraits that attempt to bridge this gap of knowing through a process of surreal re-imagination.” -- Manahil Bandukwala *
The Fiddlehead *
