My Ariel

(Paperback)

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Where were you when you first read Ariel Who were you What has changed in your life In the lives of women In My Ariel, Sina Queyras barges into one of the iconic texts of the twentieth century, with her own family baggage in tow, exploring and exploding the cultural norms, forms, and procedures that frame and contain the lives of women.

When I am a bitch I feel in such good company.
Nice girls never gave me anything but trouble,

Eating the ground out from under me, then waving
As I fall. Pity one has to die to see how liberating

Bad can be. But what news had I of my own self
Words landed like razors, hours tinkled, suitors arrived.

Listen, you'll think otherwise, but I tell you, betrayal
Is your

Get Out of Jail Free card. Take it,

Don't look back. Of course you will. Look back.
We always do, we who adore the muscle

Of our cashmere cells, a cock that makes
Our knees weak. Darlings, don't be sweet,

Or serviceable. Don't accommodate,
Write in blood or don't bother ...

Sina Queyras was born in Manitoba and grew up on the road in western Canada. She has since lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, and Calgary. Most recently, she is the author of the poetry collection MxT, which received the QWF Award for poetry, the Pat Lowther Award, and the ReLit award for poetry. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford, and Concordia University in Montreal, where she currently lives.

Reviews

"[An] astounding collection." --Kristina Marie Darling, Tupelo Quarterly

"This visceral, trenchant, and musical book reveals Queyras to be at the height of her powers." --Publishers Weekly

"Few poets are better equipped than Queyras to plunge into the examination of the figure of Plath as a prototype for female genius. With honesty, humour and passionate attention, she lays bare the gendered conventions that circumscribed Plath's life and how they are still, in new guises, determining her own life as well as that of her female students... Queyras's masterful collection does not stay in the shadow of Plath's work. Its mix of scholarship, dramatic monologue, persona-adopting and elegy could give rise to a multipronged new genre: the auto-poetic-bio-epic."
- The Globe and Mail

"The collection is so rich and so heroic, I cannot do it justice in so short a word count. Readers will need to spend a lot of time with it. Rest assured that the time will be very well spent."
- Montreal Review of Books

Author Bio

Sina Queyras was born in Manitoba and grew up on the road in western Canada. She has since lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, and Calgary where she was Markin-Flanagan Writer in Residence. She is the author most recently of the poetry collection MxT (Coach House 2014) which received the QWF Award for poetry, the Pat Lowther Award, and the ReLit award for poetry. Expressway (Coach House 2009) was nominated for a Governor Generals Award and a selection from that book won Gold in the National Magazine Awards. Lemon Hound (Coach House 2006) won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. She is also the author of the novel Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House 2011) a finalist for the Amazon First Novel award, and Unleashed (BookThug 2010), a selection of posts from the first four years of her blog, Lemon Hound. In 2005, she edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, for Persea Books. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford, and Concordia University in Montreal, where she currently resides.