Traced in Salt

By: Gaston, Lise

A ravishing book of poems that roams between freedom and powerlessness, between personal grief and a passionate love for our imperilled natural world.

Traced in Salt draws on the collision between industrial speed and slow time in coastal and prairie landscapes threatened by climate change, from the dying cedars of B.C.'s Gulf Islands to wildfire smoke engulfing northern Alberta. These poems explore urban and rural spaces through a woman's acute awareness: through her fears and desires, and the vulnerabilities she both resists and embraces.

A series of poems threaded through the collection harks back to horse-drawn conveyances, from the barouche to the hansom cab -- then slyly slips in the perambulator ("uppababy, bugaboo, bumbleride. . . "), an image which sets in motion a journey into almost unimaginable sorrow and pain. Themes of stillness, the natural world, and the maternal body devastatingly coalesce in poems that explore pregnancy loss and the delivery of a stillborn child.

Through it all, whether in the face of intimate personal or sweeping environmental grief, Traced in Salt discovers beauty that changes nothing and yet somehow changes everything.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1771872985
• ISBN13: 9781771872980
• Release Date: April 2027
• Publisher: Thistledown Press
• Length: 76 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.