When Whales Went Back to the Water

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77212-796-6
Verlag: University of Alberta Press

Buch, Englisch, 76 Seiten, Format (B × H): 164 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 134 g

Reihe: Robert Kroetsch Series

Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird’s When Whales Went Back to the Water creates a reverent container for a broken world. These poems are hymns to living in wonder through loss, joy, motherhood’s sleepless nights, domestic violence, and isolation. Offering a courageous account of queer intimate partner violence, including the impacts of femme erasure in queer communities, this book is also grounded in the tastes and textures of a new parent’s everyday and is keenly interested in our capacities during personal and global catastrophe. Haunted by hawks, coyotes, frogs, and forests, the collection also speaks to the power of the beyond-human sphere in the translation and transformation of pain and sorrow. Reaching through stories of survivorship to touch on personal and collective pain with tension, nuance and care, Baird’s poems remind us that grief is inextricably intertwined with love and joy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baird, Lisa

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- I

- When Whales Went Back to the Water

- Poem That Wanted to Be an Apple

- It Is Relevant That I’m Ovulating

- Explanation

- The Biggest Disappointment of My 16th Year

- She Says, I don’t think I’m going to fall for you

- An Alternate Universe in Which My Trauma Response Is Made of Birds

- Time Machine

- The Day Dad Starts Hitting My Younger Brother

- The First Time I Go Skinny-Dipping

- In Defence of Purple

- Poem That Wanted to Be an Icicle

- She Says It’s Dangerous to Open Umbrellas Indoors

- Why I Thought Dating Women Would Be Safer

- On Seeing the Word Trauma Graffitied Onto a Garbage Bin

- The Mouth Is Your Hardest and Softest Place

- Blue Angel

- Ode to the Mississauga Women’s Clinic

-

- II

- All His Ex-Girlfriends Are Monstrous

- Affirming Femme

- You Don’t Understand

- You Could Have Said Something

- You Leave the House for Three Different Reasons

- At the End of the Visit

- Near the End

- The Night You Break Up He Regresses Again

- How to Win after Leaving

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- III

- If You Sing It Slowly Enough

- Start with an Ode to the Toddler’s Lung Capacity

- Facts About Yellow

- Facts About Gravity

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- IV

- Field Guide

- The Cooper’s Hawk That Had a Meal

- On Day 22 I Learn My Little Brother Has COVID

- Permission

- Good News

- Trespassing Again at the Everton Cascade

- Echolocation

- Day 217

- Waiting for Owls

- Ode to the Ampersand

- Facts About Coyotes

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- Acknowledgements

Über Autor(innen)

Baird, Lisa
Lisa Baird (she/her) is a queer poet, essayist, parent, and community acupuncturist living in Thadinadonnih (“the place where they built") on the lands of the Attawandaron/Chonnonton people, and current treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, also known as Guelph, Ontario. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Room Magazine Poetry Contest and longlisted for the 2020 and 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. Baseline Press published her chapbook, Persephone’s Crickets, in 2024. Baird’s first poetry collection, Winter’s Cold Girls, was shortlisted for the 2020 Relit Award. Find her at www.lisabaird.ca and on Instagram @eramosageese.