East and West

East and West, Laura Ritland’s astonishing debut, is a book of visions. These are roving poems drawn to defamiliarizing points of view, and are exquisitely attentive to the way the world exceeds our senses (“Cloud deduced cloud / after cloud and cloud.”) Beckoningly tender, lucid and intelligent, elegaic without being maudlin, East and West explores what Ritland calls the “middle ground” of childhood, family, diaspora, and migration, and how new cultural ideas can disrupt traditional perspectives. “My bedroom window an escape hatch / to endless sights of coastal stars.” Ritland takes the measure of herself—“I’m an integer of my own society”—in one of the most distinctive and beautifully turned styles in Canadian poetry.

Contributors

Laura Ritland

Laura Ritland’s poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, CNQ, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Arc Poetry Magazine, and The Malahat Review. A recipient of the 2014 Malahat Far Horizons Award for Poetry, she currently divides her time between Vancouver and California, where she is a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley

Chapter Title Contents Contributors Pages Year Price

Preview

Summer Parties – First Houses – Tasks – Doorknob Talk – Vincent, In the Dream of Zundert – Introduction to Mystery – Arrival at the New College – Norway … 13 $1.30

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Interview with the Body – Like – Your Body is Growing – Girlhood Story – Prayer – The Age of Fungi – Goose Territory – Vestigial – Interior … 24 $2.40

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East of Error – To Marianne Moore’s Hot – Our Latter Day Pigeons – Marine Economy – Nautilus – Shark – Giant Squid – Jellyfish – Sea Spider … 22 $2.20

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April – Thing – Pacific Spirit – Song – Creaturely – October Moon – All Hours are Present – Garden Leave – Outpost 15 $1.50