Mere Extinction

“Christie’s audacious writing pulses with life and, yes, movement.” — Globe and Mail

In Evie Christie’s third book mothers nurse babies as the world comes to an end, fathers hustle or drift, the pastoral and the present collide, violence, love, and death gently fill the space and time they have been given. As surreal as they are domestic, Christie’s poems navigate the world they are in, struggle with history, the immediate, and what Richard Polt’s investigation of Heidegger would describe as “the emergency being.”

Bog Girl

After Seamus Heaney

I waited too long, was left waiting
and here I am in my fruit-white youth,
too young to go untouched, a balmy small-town dream
touched up with pink where it mattered.

Remember the ways you wanted to touch and did not
and finally broke in through the window and did
until I got smart and found their sophistication: loveless bliss,
made over and over ’til the earth packed under my nails
was gone. Find me here, waiting, gone blue and winter cold,
make out my parts from the windowsill,
not gleaming, all the same, the same as ever.