Giving My Body to Science (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)

by Rachel Rose

Opening the Storm Eye You spin the wheels of your red truck and speak of tornados you've known how they drive through homes and create orphans. I see your girlhood divided by unremarkable years and years where you crouched in the bathtub and prayed to the deep and steady anchor of the plumbing that you would be left alive after house and family had been sucked away. Picking out cherries from a roadside stand unaware of the change in weather, of you behind me. As your lips claim my neck the red relents in my fist. Coins scatter in the fruit as the sky rolls over us. The rain comes in sheets like the wings of netted birds throbbing and falling. While I buy the fruit you wait in your red truck playing the engine. I stumble to meet you drunk on the curve of your mouth, a cardinal on fermented autumn berries. With my tongue I would lick the dust from your eyes, I would offer shelter. Rachel Rose is a poet living in Montreal.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

160 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1999

About the author

Rachel Rose is the author of The Octopus Has Three Hearts, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2021. As well, she is the author of four collections of poetry, including Marry & Burn, which received a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for a Governor General’s Award. Her memoir, The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops, was shortlisted for the 2018 Arthur Ellis award for best non-fiction crime book. A former fellow at The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, she is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Vancouver and Co-Director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive (https://vancouvermanuscriptintensive.... )

Reviews

[Mary Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pain and pleasure lie side by side in these poems of abuse, survival and the discovery of strength. "Breaking the Octopus" is one sexy poem, while "Larkspur" is as real as it is hard to read. Metred poems of love between women emerge from a West Coast childhood filled w/ scars.