Overview
Award-winning poet Arleen Paré pays homage to the work of lesbian Syrian American poet Etel Adnan.
If books come from books, as David W. McFadden has claimed, then Time Out of Time is a clear example, arising, very deliberately as it does, out of Etel Adnan’s astonishing collection entitled Time. The poems in Time Out of Time are in love with the poems in Adnan’s Time and, it seems, Paré has fallen in love with Time’s author, Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned poet and painter—or perhaps it is that she has merely fallen in love with Adnan’s words. Paré’s poems mirror the form, the rhythm, the shape, the short, brief lines in her own spare missives that are the poems in Time. This mirroring increases the intensity of Time Out of Time, creating a rare intimacy in Paré’s collection. Paré’s work pays homage to Adnan’s work. Both collections pay homage to the world of the lesbian in the twenty-first century and to the world of the small poem. Using clear, crisp, well-defined language in visibly defined geometries, in “stanza after sweet-smelling stanza,” Paré attempts to examine the trials of this new century, the hush around the word lesbian, the hush of the world’s general collapse.Reviews
For He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car:
“In the case of this new book, Paré’s poetry holds nothing less than the entire state of being, in constant beautiful and frustrating creation and decay.” —Amy Reiswig, Focus magazine
For Lake of Two Mountains: “Arleen Paré’s poems are monastic prayers of forgiveness, intense simplicities that praise all we have lost, all we have left. She is a gift the world has given us. Read her and then in deep quiet read her again.” —Patrick Lane
For Paper Trail:
“How does the everyday, claustrophobic greyness of the office metamorphosize into a sensual, surreal poem? With deft lyricism, wry compassion, and a precise eye, Arleen Paré leads us into a unique and dreamlike world. In this startlingly original first book, Paré has spun gold. —Miranda Pearson, author of Prime and The AviaryAuthor Biography
Arleen Paré is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Paper Trail (NeWest Press, 2007), Lake of Two Mountains (Brick Books, 2014), and He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car (Caitlin Press, 2015). Her work has been short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and has won the American Golden Crown Award for Poetry, the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Award, and a Governor Generals’ Award for Poetry. She lives in Victoria, BC.