A Strange Relief
The dazzling grace of A Strange Relief marks the debut of a singular young poet, Sonnet L’Abbé. In her delicately architected, but toughly envisioned poems, L’Abbé surveys the world and finds it both beautiful and unjust. She portrays that complex world with luxurious rhythms and a vocabulary that invites us to marvel at language’s infinite possibilities. Whether she is writing about living in Korea in “Cheju Diary,” or about the Aral Sea in “Nomads,” she shows a keen sensitivity that can at once bear witness to the experience of the cultural outsider while vividly imagining the internal struggles of people whose stories are rarely heard within our borders. But these poems, which span the earth, are also literally about…
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April 10, 2001Sonnet L’Abbé is the author of two previous collections of poetry, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, and, most recently, the chapbook Anima Canadensis. In 2000, she won the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer under 35. In 2014, she was the guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry in English. Her work has been internationally published and anthologized. L’Abbé lives on Vancouver Island and is a professor of creative writing at Vancouver Island University.