Description

NightwoodEditions,paperback

Publication Date:April 5, 2022

Publisher Marketing:In this vibrant debut, Ellie Sawatzky rustles the underbrush of identity, seeking clarity on the nature of ownership and belonging. Haunted and inspired by old boyfriends, girls named Emily, ancestral ghosts, polar bears and mythic horses,None of This Belongs to Meplots a young womans coming of age in a time of environmental and socio-economic peril. From rural Ontario to Kitsilano to Burning Man, Sawatzky inquires into childhood learning, girlhood learning, what is inherited, what is acquired, what begins to take form in the iridescent space between innocence and experience (The bodys crystal arithmetic). Superimposing dreamscapes on realities, history on pop culture and everyday sorrows, this collection is a hymn for the broken-hearted, a plea for connection in the information age, and a call to question the ways in which we both nurture and harm one another and our environment.

None of This Belongs to Meis pertinent now more than ever, as Sawatzkys generation comes of age in a tumultuous time, forced to consider all of that which does notand may neverbelong to them. These poems invite readers to explore our inner and outer worlds, to question the ways we inhabit them, to infuse our modern lives with our potent histories.