The Jane Day Reader: Macro-macro

Monday, July 09, 2012

Macro-macro

All photos "Paradise Found," near Vermillion Bay, ON. July 8-9, 2012.

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So I spent the weekend at my brother-in-law's parents' cabin on an island near Vermillion Bay, ON.

We went for a walk each day we were there. And I used both my camera and my b-i-l's knowledge of the local flora/fauna.

The boreal forest is achingly familiar from my childhood cabin in Minaki, but I can't say that I ever mushroomed there. And this landscape was slightly different than that of my childhood, mostly birch and cedar with a few pine varieties mixed in.

The mosses and lichens and rock were familiar. I do so love the crunch when you walk on the mosses in sunny spots...

Different trees and different soil from my everyday aspen parkland means different mushrooms. And so I mostly just stumbled around, looking for anything interesting.

What proved most appealing were the slow-growing club lichens, which were extremely happy in that environment. In Assiniboine Forest, they're found in small patches on logs and stay fairly small. On Paradise Found, they were the biggest I've ever seen...and they were everywhere.

Normally, the scarcity of club lichens combined with the density of the individual patches and that fact that they're teeny tiny means that I take lots of pictures and wind up with one or two I like that are sharp.

But here, I could be choosy. I could find patches of just one variety with large specimens. Sigh...

Given my recent trips to various different forest-y places, it feels like I'm synthesizing all this information about the forest(s). I'm not sure how that information or those impressions will emerge but I should note that I'm very interested in the urban/nature essay right now.

Did I mention I rather spontaneously wrote a essay on the differences between a nature poet and a naturalist, about bats in the walls and being on retreat?

Of course, I was avoiding another, more difficult essay I've been asked to submit to an anthology about mothering.

Of course, I'm avoiding writing that essay right now.

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Praise for GUSH

"GUSH is a letter to the world declaring that feminists everywhere are ready to take back the period and claim it for ourselves." —Courtney Dickson in Herizons.

"I expect GUSH will be nonetheless passed around classrooms, as well as book clubs, women’s centres, office towers and break rooms. And I hope this sharing and the conversations that no doubt ensue are not hushed and tittering. I hope teachers, counsellors, parents and partners bookmark pages, highlight passages and display the book on prominent shelves." —Katherine J. Barrett in Understorey.

"We love GUSH!"—Open Sesame Bookstore, Kitchener.

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with its
occasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"Adept and assured, Stowaways swaggers." —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press.

"The poems in this collection grapple with both the wild and the mundane, the animalistic nature of nature and relentless responsibilities of parenthood." —Mark Sampson, Free Range Reading.

"Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways offers a scrapbook of extraordinary everydayness. Its poems decoupage tender snapshots beside snappy comebacks. Fairy tale moments foment against ailing skin. Sly instructions for loving smash into slovenly destructions of living. A beautiful, gluey mess of memory, decay, and dreams!" —Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)