Sonja Ruth Greckol's Monitoring Station enters a slipstream of space and planetary language, circling time, embodying loss and longing, generating and regenerating in a faltering climate. Orbiting through a mother's death, a grandbaby's birth, and a pandemic summer, these poems loop and fragment in expansive and empathetic ways. The title poem locates a settler voice revisiting Treaties 6 and 7 and the M tis lands of her Alberta childhood, while the overall collection is tethered to Toronto shadowed by northland prairie. Nimble, energetic, and challenging, the book engages a dense kind of poetic thinking about belonging and responsibility to people and place, within both recent history and far-flung cosmic realities. Falling squarely within a Canadian feminist experimental lyric trajectory, and grounded in bodily, personal, and political experience, Monitoring Station embodies the passage of a damaged world across generations.
Sales Tips:
-Greckol is an established writer with three previous collections of poetry.
-Monitoring Station is a M bius strip of a book, navigating between the anchors of mothering/daughtering, a settler interrogation of place and history, and a chronicling of the fragmented first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
-Greckol purposefully engages a dense kind of poetic thinking to examine connections between what's come before, what's happening now, and what's coming next.
-The book's stress on mothers and daughters and granddaughters is carefully partnered with a doubled view of our place, now, when settler cultures are finally being forced to think through their (our) own privileges, when COVID has highlighted the economic and structural inequalities existent in the setup of a global north vs. global south, and when climate change threatens to expose the blindness at the heart of contemporary capitalist systems.
-Falling squarely within a Canadian feminist experimental lyric trajectory, and grounded in bodily, personal, and political experience, Monitoring Station embodies the passage of a damaged world across generations.
-Part of what makes the book unique is its balance between the lyric and the conceptual, the experimental and the grounded.
Audience:
-It will appeal to readers of contemporary poetry who are attracted to conceptual, feminist, and eco-poetic models; to readers seeking to parse the pandemic in an intelligent, thoughtful way; to readers looking to interrogate their own place on treaty lands as settlers, or the violence enacted on BIPOC bodies around the world.
-Readers will praise its attention to detail, celebrate its willingness to face difficult truths, and applaud its spirit of experimental lyricism.
-The work is also connected to the central CanLit tradition of autobiographical free-verse lyricism.
Industry Reviews
"An illuminated simmer of sweetness from a poet who invents vessels for language to carry us over into presence, into the before and the after, holding us to the now. But oh, the exquisite workings of the mind over what matters, the inescapable dailyness of bloodlines, and geography, interdimensional and relational; a theory of everything." Lillian Allen, dub poet, reggae musician, writer, Juno winner
"Sonja Greckol's Monitoring Station is an enthralling exercise in intricating: the opposite, she explains, of extricating, thus 'a verb meaning entangle or ensnare.' What we find ourselves intricated with here-in propulsive, rippling, encircling syntax-is space and time, biological and cosmological origins, the pandemic and the human hash of colonialism and climate change. Under Greckol's lyric microscope, 'small things loom large' and beauty is always a hair's breadth from disaster. This is one of our very best poetic minds, humming along at the top of her form." Stephen Collis, author of A History of the Theories of Rain
"With the analytic mind of a statistician and the flow of a mystic, Sonja Greckol takes us into a chaotic, poetic fray as fraught near-pasts open out into possibilities. By tracing points, lines, and waves that situate a body (of a person, of a work) in all its specificities along with its imbricated activities that accumulate into (and rub against) structures, institutions, and systems, Greckol suggests ways towards futures in which social relations can be remade to accommodate more ethical interrelations among individuals and communities." Shannon Maguire, author of Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina and Fur(l) Parachute
