About this item
Highlights
- Longlisted for the 2024 Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In PoetryFinalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year AwardsIn these peculiar times, we are thrust back into ourselves in a kind of suspension: one in which only private life exists yet threatens to become trivial through a sense of mutual, overarching dread.Lent from award-winning writer Kate Cayley is built from this tension, exploring domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary--large and small--converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, and moments.
- About the Author: KATE CAYLEY is the author of several books, including the poetry book, Lent, and the short story collection, How You Were Born, winner of the Trillium Book Award and shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.
- 86 Pages
- Poetry, LGBT
Description
Book Synopsis
Longlisted for the 2024 Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
In these peculiar times, we are thrust back into ourselves in a kind of suspension: one in which only private life exists yet threatens to become trivial through a sense of mutual, overarching dread.
Lent from award-winning writer Kate Cayley is built from this tension, exploring domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary--large and small--converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, and moments. The grotesque and the tedious, the baroque and the banal, intertwine in the first three sections. Meticulous depictions of spectacle run into the repetition of daily domestic life: trying to explain time to children, day trips to the planetarium, and the warnings of strangers; these are interspersed with depictions such as Mary Shelley recalling the monster, the inner life of a seventeenth century portrait sitter, and Ted Hughes's second wife telling her story to the dead Sylvia Plath. The title section explores religious faith; how belief is itself a repetition, a slow accumulation over time, just like love or forgiveness.
Lent is an exquisite work of our era, asking us to contemplate what it means to live in a broken world--and why we still find it beautiful.
Review Quotes
"Attention is a quality in short supply these days; the poems in Lent are a kind of benediction, a practice requiring careful attention to what the world offers." --That Shakespearean Rag
"Cayley's poems are almost structured as acts of unwrapping, or as working a particular kind of puzzle, each line inching closer towards a particular solution, discovery or revelation." --rob mclennan
"Full of delightful allusions to Sylvia Plath and others, these intelligent poems offer evocative and rewarding rumination." --Publishers Weekly
"Gorgeous and startling, the poems in Kate Cayley's Lent emerge as a testament to poetry itself: the desire to grapple with an imperfect world, and yet respond with praise... Lent is a wonder." --Steven Price, Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted author of Lampedusa
"I didn't think I'd forgotten how close poetry can get to us--inside our eyes, below our thoughts--but reading Kate Cayley's poems, I feel newly awed at their sure and profound nearness." --Sadiqa de Meijer, Governor General's Literary Award-winning author of alfabet/alphabet
"I've read this book twice, and I will read it again. It's that kind of book."--The Fiddlehead
"Kate Cayley grapples with overwhelming themes with elegance and precision... Linked by the concluding titular poem, Lent is a brilliant read that answers every question it asks." --The Miramichi Reader
"These are poems that are completed by their encounters with difficult things--they do not take note of, they live with. And they read the way the best poems do, like parts of one returned to one. I love this book." --Shane McCrae, author of Cain Named the Animal
"Eventually, most of the things one loves fill one with worry, and, paradoxically, the more deeply one loves, the more quickly one is filled. Poetry fills me with worry--because, thankfully, it is always changing. But Kate Cayley's Lent, though it is filled with love and worry, doesn't worry me at all--not because it isn't new; it's as new as tomorrow--but because it is so well made. These are poems that are completed by their encounters with difficult things--they do not take note of, they live with. And they read the way the best poems do, like parts of one returned to one. I love this book; it does not worry me." --Shane McCrae, author of Cain Named the Animal
"Gorgeous and startling, the poems in Kate Cayley's Lent emerge as a testament to poetry itself. Lent is a wonder." --Steven Price, Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted author of Lampedusa
"I didn't think I'd forgotten how close poetry can get to us--inside our eyes, below our thoughts--but reading Kate Cayley's poems, I feel newly awed at their sure and profound nearness." --Sadiqa de Meijer, Governor General's Literary Award winning author of alfabet / alphabet
Lent is a finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Books of the Year Awards in the Poetry category.
About the Author
KATE CAYLEY is the author of several books, including the poetry book, Lent, and the short story collection, How You Were Born, winner of the Trillium Book Award and shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. She has won the O. Henry Short Story Prize, the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, and the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. She has been a finalist for the K. M. Hunter Award, the Carter V. Cooper Short Story Prize, and the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and been longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize and CBC Books Prizes in both poetry and fiction. Cayley lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.
