Böcker av Sarah De Leeuw

Award-winning poet Sarah de Leeuw considers the ways in which words and languages form and embolden coloniality and create unequal imaginings of--and power in--place. In Lot, award-winning poet and essayist Sarah de Leeuw returns to the landscape of her early girlhood to consider the racial complexities of colonial violence in those spaces. Following loosely as a companion to Skeena (Caitlin Press, 2015), Lot is written entirely of couplets, mirroring the two main islands of Haida Gwaii, and draws on lyric traditions, assemblage, and investigative poetry techniques to re-imagine geological and anthropological data, re-read colonial documents, and interrogate the role of language in centering stories of white supremacy on and about the islands. Written in a time of ostensible Truth and Reconciliation in lands now called Canada, a time when the Government of British Columbia has declared support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples but continues to arrest Indigenous peoples in their homes and on unceded lands, Lot draws a firm, and yet poetic, line between historic and present-day white-Euro-colonial violence. Through structure, form, and sound, the poems in Lot insist on the possibilities of poetry to create better worlds, to utter something anew.

The author crisscrosses the Canadian-American border to understand dilemmas that occur across a variety of scales, from global spheres to the most intimate domestic spaces. She digs through grief, loss, aging, technological frustration, environmental degradation, nationalism, and confusion to grasp the state of the world.

This is a highly-charged collection of personal essays, haunted by loss, evoking turbulent physical and emotional Canadian landscapes. Sarah de Leeuw''s creative non-fiction captures strange inconsistencies and aberrations of human behaviour, urging us to be observant and aware. The essays are wide in scope and exposing what -- and who -- goes missing. With staggering insight, Sarah de Leeuw reflects on missing geographies and people, including missing women, both those she has know and those whom she will never get to know. The writing is courageously focused, juxtaposing places and things that can be touched and known -- emotionally, physically, psychologically -- with what has become intangible, unnoticed, or actively ignored. Throughout these essays, de Leeuw''s imagistic memories are layered with meaning, providing a survival guide for the present, including a survival that comes with the profound responsibility to bear witness.