Mere Extinction: Poems
$15.99-
“Christie’s audacious writing pulses with life and, yes, movement.” — Globe and Mail
In Evie Christie’s third book mothers nurse babies as the world comes to an end, fathers hustle or drift, the pastoral and the present collide, violence, love, and death gently fill the space and time they have been given. As surreal as they are domestic, Christie’s poems navigate the world they are in, struggle with history, the immediate, and what Richard Polt’s investigation of Heidegger would describe as “the emergency being.”
Bog GirlAfter Seamus Heaney
I waited too long, was left waiting
and here I am in my fruit-white youth,
too young to go untouched, a balmy small-town dream
touched up with pink where it mattered.Remember the ways you wanted to touch and did not
and finally broke in through the window and did
until I got smart and found their sophistication: loveless bliss,
made over and over ’til the earth packed under my nails
was gone. Find me here, waiting, gone blue and winter cold,
make out my parts from the windowsill,
not gleaming, all the same, the same as ever.BUY FROM:
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Evie Christie is the author of Gutted and The Bourgeois Empire. She has adapted plays for Luminato, Necessary Angel Theatre Company, and the National Theatre School of Canada. She lives in Ontario.
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Published: April 2021
ISBN: 9781770415461
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 in.
Pages: 64
Reviews
“Upon learning of her adaptive scriptwriting accomplishments, we can fix the explanation for Evie Christie’s complex use of motivation, conflict, pathos, and trauma—humanity’s theater writ large in her work. That she does it with Shakespearean wit follows unexpectedly.” — Foreword Reviews
“Evie Christie’s second poetry collection Mere Extinction forthcoming from ECW Press is a sprawling empire of beating hearts and lost children, apocalyptic prepping and climate change, single moms and human bewilderment. The poems are harrowing and honest. Neighbours make small talk, men high on cocaine stand on balconies texting, the heart goes on repeating itself, and mere extinction awaits us all.” — Miramichi Reader
“A stunning book of beautiful contemporary poetry from a brilliant Canadian poet. I absolutely love her work.” — Rowan Somerville, The End of Sleep and The Shape of Her
“Lyric meditations on a gritty urban present populated by, in Christie’s words, ‘bare-knuckled bankers of King Street’ and ‘meat-eating Annex Vegans’ alongside nostalgia for a suburban past … speaks uncannily to our current crisis, in their respective insistence on finding humour, beauty, resilience, and, yes, meaning in a world which continually reminds us of threats beyond mere extinction.” — Quill & Quire
“This astonishing and gorgeous work fills me with terror, proves to me with its darkly dreamt vivisections that I’ve been kidding myself about my own exposed and throbbing heart. You want to wake up and shake the dread off, but these little scenarios featuring mothers, infants, and faceless lovers persist, too real and ever-struggling in an inky maternal fluid that no amount of waking can drain away. Every line vibrates with pure feeling and its blackest echo. I feel like I’ve been keeping myself from my own life all along.” — Guy Maddin