Laura Farina
ISBN 978-1-77126-045-9
$17.00 CDN/USA
90 pages
It’s been nearly a decade since Laura Farina’s celebrated first book of poetry, This Woman Alphabetical, won the 2006 Archibald Lampman Prize for best book by an Ottawa poet. Farina’s follow-up, Some Talk of Being Human, which she began almost immediately after, is a charming, whimsical and occasionally dark collection about entering the world of adulthood. The poems here take place in Ottawa, South Bend, Toronto, Banff and Vancouver, and they span three different romantic relationships. But these are not typical love poems or relationship poems. They’re interested in the small details — telephone calls, weather, half-full jars of mayo — that make up the everyday, human, life. In this collection, Laura Farina explores what a home is: finding one, returning to one and making one.
ON THIS WOMAN ALPHABETICAL:
“A brisk, engaging read. … Farina’s poems are refreshingly under-done, with an innate sense of the energy and spontaneity of lyric. … At her best, Farina plucks the tenuous line between contemplation and irreverence. There is something of Frida Kahlo here: the obsessive image-making; the meditations on personal pain; the surrealist impetus. Or of Georgia O’Keefe, in the poems’ deceptively simple clarity.” — Triny Finlay, Arc