Parlance

(Paperback)

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Description

Pressed leaflet variable between the covers of anything brisk. Infused on the brink of staggering conception. Immaculate handle given by the power to define. In Zambia did kinship kindle. Homogeneous assemblage of molecular grace. Leopard print sans serif looming. State determined posture lulling. An ornament or translation singing. The terms of crumpled questions airing. To linearize becoming woman. Inimical custom of counting. Edible empire behooves the darkness swallowing sunshine in various volumes. One more hour capsized by metaphor. Run, she says, the ports are open.

The poems in Parlance thrash against the matrix of their own referential nature using a series of linguistic echoes that reference writers like the 'maternal' Virginia Woolf or the 'paternal' Leonard Cohen. The rebellious child of Zelazo's text splinters its Modernist and Canadian parentage to occupy an uncharted linguistic space somewhere between excess and void.

These poems are painterly, splintered, majestic. An accomplished first book of poetry, Parlance is an act of becoming, and of coming home.

Reviews

'On those increasingly rare occasions when poetry and poetic language actually manage to entertain, provoke and raise the bar, it's time for everyone-even the recovering and the abstainers - to break out their party duds and noisemakers, give their personal Jesus some time off, and paint the town red. Parlance calls for two coats: it's going to be a long night. Because whether it's the 'hieroglyph ammunition' her incredibly musical prose poems pack or the fractured ache that prepares the free-form, Woolfian ground of her wonderful long poem 'Through the Lighthouse, ' something's being said here that many writers never, ever find the language for.'

Author Bio

A former Montrealer, Suzanne Zelazo has been a citizen of Toronto for the last ten years. She is the founder and current editor-in-chief of Queen Street Quarterly (a journal of contemporary writing), a Ph.D. candidate in English at York University, a competitive runner, identical twin and part-time bartender.