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Ritual Lights
On "A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould":
"The poem sits up at its greasy-spoon counter and recounts its tale, a kind of cryptic plain-speech, an inverted code, all the more puzzling for what it plainly says: ‘Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved,’ as Robert Frost said." — Jeffery Donaldson
Absorbed in the small, everyday rituals of existence, this remarkable collection of poems tears open the fruit of life and scoops out beauty and joy, pain and suffering, in equal measure. Ritual Lights takes the reader on a journey through an underworld that is both familiar and uncanny, a space between death and life where one nourishes the other. Shadowed by the aftermath of sexual assault, Joelle Barron places candles in the darkest alcoves, illuminates mysteries, and rises again to an abundant Earth where the darkness is transformed into rich loam.
These poems follow the speaker through grieving and loss, heartbreak, repression, and discovery, seeking, never finding an answer, but finding meaning in the work of continuing. A meditation on trauma and identity, deeply vulnerable and reserved, funny and full of rage, Ritual Lights explores the sometimes messy and ugly, but always necessary, nature of survival.
Contributors
Joelle Barron
Joelle Barron is a writer living as a settler on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe of Treaty 3 (Kenora, ON). They received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia in 2014. Their poems have appeared in several magazines, including ARC Poetry Magazine, Plenitude Magazine, the New Quarterly, and SAD Mag. “A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould” won the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award in 2014; “Mercurial” placed third in CV2’s 2-Day Poem Contest in 2017. Joelle works as a co-ordinator for SPACE, an LGBT2S+ youth group.
