• Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher, Finalist

This Side of Light is Carolyn Marie Souaid's ninth book of poetry. Selected and introduced by Governor General award-winning poet Arleen Pare, this timely volume celebrates the evolution and scope of Souaid's work over a 25-year period--from the early titles focused on human connectedness and the difficult bridging of worlds, to more recent ones exploring themes of aging, loss, letting go, and the vulnerability of life. Praised for her bold experiments with the long poem, Souaid is known for her evocative imagery, "surprising lyric twists" (Event) and "sudden illuminations on the rim of our consciousness" (Rover Montreal), and has been described by P.K. Page as having a "dark and powerful voice."

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The Wind, Not Nothing

It’s not in the steady pull of light toward you, but in

the first instant, the flash, when suddenly you recognize

the capacity for ugliness and beauty

under one roof. Whitefish. Rusty cigarette foil

floating backwards in the sea. What it all means

for the silvered brain. To harbour interconnectedness:

a man dies and the rest of the world goes on thrashing

someplace else. To see deception in all its prisms: snowflakes

and their glass houses. A loved one, cutting you.

To stare into someone’s downcast eyes and still see

summer’s compassionate hours: the delicate

browns of flowering mushrooms. Scruff returning

to the fold. Arctic heather. A gull, say, and his wan shadow,

traipsing after the wind.

The wind, I said — not

nothing.

Augury, I

The world is calling out for the world.

In the throat, an endless mountain,

words rising, the shapes unnatural,

a bluish bit of hush at the centre.

See the circling hawk: there is longing here.

And So, the Wind

I awoke to handfuls of light,

the cool wind pressing through a window.

Undulating curtains.

My blood sugar spiked, energy pumped

through my body’s meridians.

I was as open

as new life blinking into the sun

for the first time,

a blank slate, ignorant

of our long, dark, collective history:

sooty traces of the Industrial Revolution

coating our lungs. Unaware

of the naysayers and conspiracy theorists,

fascists and colonizers

fighting like wolves for the scraggy earth,

however fucked up;

I marked an X on the great,

white, marble museums

rigged with dynamite and set for extinction,

erudite civilizations

detonating into the atmosphere.

And so, the wind.

It came to me, in a shallow breath, that nothing mattered,

nothing at all,

it addressed me by name, this flush wind,

it rippled through me,

it rose and fell like a tribe of women, dancing.