The Dowager Empress by Adele Wiseman
The Dowager Empress launches Oct. 3 2019 at Ben McNally’s in Toronto, 6-8 and Oct. 5 in Kingston, Novel Idea, 7-9.
Adele Wiseman’s poems, the major work of the last ten years of her life, largely unpublished before now, are tough, curious, original, authentic and accessible. Like her novels and non-fiction, they are vision-clearing.
Understories (Inanna, 2014)
Understories is an exploration of things visible mostly to the inner eye and memory, things below the surface. It explores loss, but also recovery through memory and language.
Two poems in Understories were short-listed for the Descant/ Winston Collins Prize in 2011 and 2013.
Moving
Moving is a life journey about the search for home: imaginative, spiritual, emotional and actual. Underlying the poems are two lost homes—the poet's childhood home, which she moved from when she was seven, and her mother's—a home stattered by her mother's (the poet's grandmother's) death and her little brother's death at seven.
The Iron Shoes (Hidden Brook, 2007)
A collection of poems inspired by Kingston's streets and haunted houses and a journey through the poet's past as she invokes and lays to rest some of her old ghosts.