About the book
- Finalist for the 2022 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award
Searching for Signal is a long poem that bears witness to the quotidian, disorienting shifts of grief as a father makes his way toward his death over 3 seasons. This is mourning conducted in situ, the gift of observing one man quietly taking his leave and the impacted hole it leaves behind. The language is mix of narrative lyric and fragmentary breath-spaced verse; the silences are his private silences, alluding to memory, family trauma and shame. The hunter, the gatherer who never stopped trying for epiphanies, a daughter engaged in the same effort, frankly facing the span of a swift human lifetime that may pass without revelation or resolution. If there is redemption it is in the daughter bringing clarity to the physical condition of living and dying and the emotional intricacies of existence.
About the author
Born in Saskatchewan, Lori Cayer has made Manitoba her home since the third grade. She is the author of four volumes of poetry: Mrs Romanov (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2017), Dopamine Blunder (Tightrope Books, 2016), Attenuations of Force (Frontenac House, 2010) and Stealing Mercury (The Muses’ Company, 2004), which won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book in Manitoba in 2004. In 2005 Lori won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. She is co-founder of the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Prix Lansdowne de poésie, part of the Manitoba Writing and Publishing Awards. By day Lori is a virtual editorial assistant for two scientific research journals.
Excerpt
your body remembers the marbles you used as a calendar each a contemplation an appreciation for the day you’d been given then tossed the jar emptying over years you bought twenty years too many we take them in our pockets where we go leave deposits of you in the celluloid narrative in the Bay of Pigs I launched a blue-eyed one in the glare it fell into the sky twice
Reviews
“Winnipeg poet Lori Cayer’s fifth full-length poetry collection, after Stealing Mercury (The Muses’ Company, 2004), Attenuations of Force (Frontenac House, 2010), Dopamine Blunder (Tightrope Books, 2016) and Mrs Romanov (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2017) is the book-length poem Searching for Signal (Signature Editions, 2021). Composed as a long poem that reveals itself…” >>
— Rob McLennan's Blog
Video
Voices in Verse: Spring 2021 Poetry Book Launch
Join Lori Cayer, James Scoles, and Caroline Wong with host Charlene Diehl for the Voices in Verse: Spring 2021 Poetry Book Launch.