Description
Book SynopsisFinalist, Raymond Souster Award
In this timely and powerful debut, Síle Englert explores what it is to feel othered in a world where everything is connected. Moving through time and memory — from childhood to motherhood, from historical figures and events to the precarious environment of the Anthropocene — Englert’s voice brims with grief while still holding space for whimsy.
Juxtaposing unlikely metaphors and inchoate memories, these poems wander a timeline where Amelia Earhart’s bones call out from the past, an abandoned department store mannequin keeps an eye on the future, and spacecraft sing to each other through the dark: "we are only what we remember." Unearthing objects beautiful and bizarre, The Lost Time Accidents challenges the reader’s perceptions, finding empathy for the lost, the broken, and the overlooked.
Trade Review“‘We drag the future through every hesitant hour, / scrabbling for safe places to grow fragile things.’ Englert is the loving curator of our peculiarities and vulnerabilities, giving a radically empathetic behind-the-scenes tour of the magpie museum of memory. Weaving a heady dark magic, like having your blood drawn by a gently mesmerizing vampire,
The Lost Time Accidents bares the body’s interior beauty with reverence for its mysteries. These poems are bewitching post-apocalyptic love songs from the Island of Misfit Toys, a lost map to a secret garden, the fossilized remains of fabulous sea creatures, a crystalline curiosity cabinet of rare spun glass insects, the difference engine of alternate history and histology, an autopsy by gaslight of the heavy human heart. With painterly vision and precise language, Englert makes new the world, knowing that ‘To find what’s left of our names, / these rock bellies must be broken open.’” -- Roxanna Bennett, author of
The Untranslatable I“Beautiful, haunting, psychological and vividly real all at once, Englert’s
The Lost Time Accidents is definitely worth the read.” -- Zoë Lebrun *
The Manitoban *
“
The Lost Time Accidents demonstrates an obvious mastery of language, imagery, and literary devices. Gorgeously executed and obviously queer, each poem in the collection is a triumph.” -- Rachel Friars *
Lesbrary *
