UNMET (ebook)

Description

This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you werent caught up in the chorus.Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen,UNMETis a poetry collection that explores themes of frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Tony Hoagland and Diane Seuss, robertss musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what could be, negotiating the past without losing hope for the future.Praise forrushes from the river of disappointmentroberts speaks with clarity and certainty, in a firm and haunting voice. This is an author clearly driven by a need to articulate what is missed. She is unafraid to end a poem abruptly and to let the quiet that follows do some of the speaking. Shes also clearly having funwith physics, with form, with the second grammar of the line break, and with memories joyous and shocking and neither and both.Quebec Writers Federation A.M. Klein Award juryThis collection enchanted mesmart, thoughtful, inventive, unafraid, poignant, and engaging, these poems are spot on. How lucky are we in this heartbreaking world to have roberts compelling voice of beauty, humor, and depth allowing us to dip our toes in this exquisite river of poems.Kelli Russell Agodon, author ofHourglass MuseumA moving and poignant book of poetry, in which roberts exhibits tremendous range in both form and tone. Easily one of the finest poetry titles out this spring.Annick MacAskill, authorMurmurationsA sweeping force of music, pulsing images, clear wit, and tenderness. Within beautifully formed poems, there is extensive consideration of what we can understand about love and grief alongside faith and unbelief over time.Montreal Review of Books