About the book
- Winner of the 2020 Fred Kerner Book Award
- Longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence in Poetry
About the author
Adrienne Drobnies has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley; she has worked at Simon Fraser University and the Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver. Her origins are in Texas and California and she has spent most of her life in Toronto and Vancouver. A graduate of the Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio, her poetry has appeared in Canadian literary magazines, including The Antigonish Review, Event, Riddle Fence, The Toronto Quarterly, and The Maynard, as well as The Cider Press Review and Sow’s Ear Review in the US, and Popshot Magazine in the UK. She is an editor of a collection of poetry in French, Poèmes sur Mesure, by Alain Fournier. Her poetry received honourable mention in the Compton Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Vallum Award for poetry. Her long poem “Randonnées” won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Award for Best Suite of Poems by an Emerging Poet and was a finalist for the CBC literary award for poetry.
Excerpt
Day in lab, night in the cemetery
for Meg Torwl
Bright bubbling cells
everyone hopes to kill
The poor products of the body
go crazy
anti-apoptosing
like the pure products of America
Dr. Williams knew
Chemotherapy
like hammering a nail
into a board
over and over
until it can go no further
Running rituximab
through a convulsing body
Anything ending in “ab”
will cost you much more
than you want to pay
There’s nothing more we can do now
I work in hell
the burning brightness of hell
the dark light of hell
where sequencing slides skim along
beneath the laser scan
Illumina named for
four bands of scintillating lights
pouring out in terabytes
from well upon well
no one gets to the bottom of them
no one is cured
Still searching
for the transcription factor grail
in the structure of the genome –
this four-colour map problem
not yet solved
The wild type
The unchanged one
The mutant
what survives
A change in order
and lung cancer thrives
My father turns to
ash in the ocean
born and dying in the serous sea
filmed with chlorinated effluents
For the longest time
my body would not create
not a baby
not a poem
And then it did
And now I wonder
what wild
unregulated creativity
will finally kill me
Legacy
A slide rule and a book
of mathematical tables.
The rule is made of bamboo,
flexible and smooth, it will not warp.
The inner plank and
glass lens slide easily
along self-lubricating grooves.
A case of cracked leather.
For 400 years mathematicians
and engineers used this device
based on the logarithms of John Napier,
known as Marvellous Merchiston.
Before I could read, I recited long
strings of Fibonacci numbers.
When I was eight, my father began
the lessons in set theory,
the critical distinction
between ‘or’ and ‘and,’
union and intersection,
the empty set.
A poet asked me if my father
took his work home with him.
I don’t think he knows many mathematicians.
Those who do understand
a mathematician is the work.
In this, like a poet.
The tables solve integrals
I no longer desire to.
Reviews
“The first section of Salt and Ashes addresses the primal, inextricable relationship between mother and child, specifically the generations of mothers who protect and “keep well” their daughters and teach them “how scars last.” A mother gives “birth to this…” >>
— Jami Macarty The Maynard
“Adrienne Drobnies’ Salt and Ashes is a powerful, intimate book, a journey marked by a legacy of early pain and power inflicted — the old suffering, then the new; the loss of a beloved husband, the grief, emptiness, acceptance, and recovery, the…” >>
— John Swanson The Ormsby Review
“Riding the bus is not what it used to be. (I know, add it to the list…)
One of my greatest joys on transit used to come in observing the range of faces I encountered there—some closed…” >>
— Rob Taylor Word Vancouver
Video
Salt and Ashes - 2poem2 Tuesday
This 2poem2 Tuesday video features the beautiful, ghost-filled poems of Adrienne Drobnies and Shirley Camia.
Audio
Saturday, November 21
CBC
Poet and scientist Adrienne Drobnies discusses her poetry collection Salt and Ashes on North by Northwest with Sheryl MacKay.
Listen to the full interview here:
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-43-north-by-northwest/clip/15810196-saturday-november-21
(1:28:39)
PURCHASE FORMAT
PAPERBACK
EBOOK
$9.99
108 pages
Epub ISBN: 9781773241111
Accessible Ebook. This Publication meets the requirements of the EPUB Accessibility specification with conformance to WCAG 2.0 Level AA. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page list, landmark, reading order, and structural navigation.