Description
Book SynopsisSilence in the belly of the breathing house. Night so deep / it's reaching through rooms as if searching its pockets.
Standing in the midst of her childhood home, Margo Wheaton was struck by two things: the extent of the damage caused by her father's and stepmother's alcoholism and the life force that pulsed in the once-vibrant rooms and yard in the abandoned trees, neglected flowerbeds, and gardens her parents had planted and tended for decades.
Radiant, grieving, and intensely musical, Rags of Night in Our Mouths is an exploration of human and environmental states of precarity and vulnerability. In the opening suite, Wheaton draws upon her family's deep roots in the Tantramar Marsh area and constructs a hallucinatory world of fragility, chaos, and searing natural beauty as she writes her own version of Maritime gothic. Employing a variation of the ghazal, a historically Persian form popularized in Canada by the late New Brunswickbased poet John Thompson, she surv
Trade Review
“Rags of Night in Our Mouths is a haunting masterpiece of intimate negotiation. Harnessing all powers of the senses, these poems reach out to feel their way through darkened rooms, wild weather, and lost landscapes of the past and present. This is an unforgettable performance, and perhaps the most viscerally honest book of poetry to come out of Atlantic Canada in the last decade.” Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting and Animal Person
“Margo Wheaton’s poetry of brooding hours and raw intensities is polished by phrasing of rare precision. In places both outer and inner, we hear a ‘primal / speech of branches clacking’ and learn that ‘family’s / an old night, its chaos Miltonic.’ Readers will find themselves riveted, their lives expanded by this strong-hearted book packed with truthfulness, tenderness, and music.” Brian Bartlett, author of Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal
