"Blythe’s poetry deftly mingles humour and hardship to capture the beauty and tragedy of the everyday. "You pick up a poetry book and open the pages and sometimes you are transported. photocopied half-a-dozen poems out of this book and mailed them to my friends "I keep circling back to poems - they go so simply, steadily to your heart " At the heart of Ali Blythe’s courageous debut collection is a bruising search for identity īlythe’s poems are permeable they breathe they create space for identities and expressions that wash away, that are “unable to be,” that are unable to achieve being’s solidity and certainty and don’t really want to anyways. " remind me of that feeling when you look up at the sky and and have this realization of how vast everything is and you feel so small "wry observation and a chaotic wit.a welcome voice in the dark, cleaving and binding of our immaterial desires to our bodies " Twoism is heavily coded with binary and dualisms, strewn with cloaks, masks, animal skins and sick blankets, and rich with literary allusion "Twoism compresses fizzing desire into a staccato mythic-demotic "intelligent and charming, jangly and jarring, moody, dreamy and a little bit deadly "His thoughts stretched wide, longing in between, Blythe illuminates a world both ruined and beautiful "perhaps incurring the most dog-eared pages ever "Blythe's stark, deft poems build a spectacular debut Winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry 2017ĬBC collections from up-and-coming Canadian poets to readĤ9th Shelf most anticipated poetry for springĤ9th Shelf 26 books to celebrate for poetry month “An intimate, attentive, and patiently affecting book that lives up to all of the possibilities of its titleįinalist for 2020 Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize Derek Beaulieu, Calgary Poet Laureate, 2014-2016 “ Hymnswitch wears the good, solid boots of language to trek through the unsendable here of daily decision matthew heinz, author of Entering Transmasculinity “Ali Blythe pierces your skins, awakening perceptions you had allowed to settle under the surface. Writer's Trust Recommended Read by Adam Sol Walrus Top Ten Books of 2019 by Zoe Whittall "I kept handing the book to friends, saying, 'Read this-it’s so smart.' When I finished the last page, I read it again, which is something I almost never do on display in Ali Blythe’s second poetry collection, Hymnswitch "Strategies of paradox, crystalline hermetic eloquences, are. "You.have been invited into an intimate space, to wear the poet’s skin for a moment, to hold his breath " Hymnswitch.makes an important contribution to the field of trans poetics It’s exciting to see a writer so conscious of building a body of work within and across collections, pursuing not just a set of ideas and concerns but an artistic vision "Blythe’s sense of orchestration is on fullest display…. "With incredible economy of language and dialectical drama at the levels of sentence and caesura, Blythe delivers taut yet expansive hymns from 'the golden-throated era / of the hormone' He lives in Portland, Oregon."Blythe brings a mastery of precision and cadence to bear in creating poems that pulse with emotion, complexity and vulnerability Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. A seven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Nancy D. John Sibley Williams is the editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies and the author of nine collections, including Disinheritance and Controlled Hallucinations. The story of that winged boy who, only after Means almost home, that there’s a differenceīetween cemetery & potter’s field, that lastĪs this thick sterile hospital air gone pungentĪs overwatered flowers. To each other tied to a structure that keeps Or lay me over your knee now that it’s too late That enemy is just another word for yesterday There’s always been too much life to handle, Which is to say good enough to know it by. & though there’s nothing left to move us, Spitting in the face of death, like pissing Said obedience is liberating, killing like Letter in Response to a Letter from My Grandfather Apiary & Woodshop Letter in Response to a Letter from My Grandfather Into a Different Nightīurned the impurities from or if it matters
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