About the book
The “I” in this book moves from person to person and from person to place, following an urge to shape the chaos of life into language that is sometimes undecipherable, sometimes ludic or comic. Layers and mixed states mine the depths of modern anguish and disbelief. But there is joy in the spirit of these poems, even when it’s scant and spare; even when it’s living off scraps of love, solace and exaltation; even when it’s yearning to let the mind or the heart go uncaged, if only for a transitory moment.
The world is under new management, and the melancholy of mourning what once was—the wind-swept shiver that lives and sings in back-story—keeps filling the characters and motivations of the unknown personae of The Time Between.
About the author
The Time Between is Patria Rivera’s fourth poetry collection. Her first poetry collection, Puti/White, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She has co-authored two chapbooks, Weathering: An Exchange of Poems and Sixth from the Sixth. Rivera’s poetry is featured in Oxford University Press’s Perspectives in Ideology, and in Elana Wolff’s Implicate me: Short essays on reading contemporary poems. Her poems have also been published in the Literary Review of Canada, Fireweed, and other Canadian and international publications. In 1997 Rivera won an honourable mention in the ARC Poetry Magazine Second Annual Poem of the Year Contest for her poem, “Living on the borders, dying in the margins.” In 2005 her poem “Rare species” was selected as the second-prize winner in the QWERTY’s Eric Hill Award of Poetic Excellence competition. Rivera was also a recipient of the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry. Born and raised in the Philippines, Rivera graduated with a journalism degree from the University of the Philippines. She has also studied in Sydney, Australia, Berlin, Germany, and in the Nieman Center at Harvard University.
Excerpt
from "FABRICATION"
The difference betweenmurder and mutilation
is not at the top
of the agenda for our enlightenment to decide
Fabrication or forgery or outright lie
I will leave in plain view for all
who we are for and against
I will torment woo or esteem the first man
who fails to express his suspicion with hate Death defies
mindlessness forgetfulness feigned amnesia
the terrain of oblique unease
when the frame of lies exposes it
the sleepy town will stagger out from ruin
twisted and tense
along the line between real and construct
recreations increasingly elaborate
rubble of spare parts and discontinued
words The departed
in withered trees drift disengage
their apparitions calling out the
named the nameless
headless woman in shuttered evensong
who locks every line every image in her web of meaning
The flood the rusty tap the aggressive turtles
where waiting rooms wait for no one
Reviews
“A series of conversations infected and inflected by operation-manual speech and military-industrial-complex mores and malaise, these poems mine the depths of modern anguish, while still finding love, however spare or transitory it is.” >>
— Prairie Books NOW