A Skeletal Wand

In her finest collection of poetry to date, Ruth Roach Pierson marshals her considerable expository powers to explore personhood, paranormal phenomenon, and mortality. A Skeletal Wand reaches out with poems that are both honest and strange, touching on a diverse range of subjects that overlap and disrupt easy interpretation. When Pierson writes ?For decades her identity / was derivative / like scent / from a perfume bottle,? it is with the belief that character is not set in stone, and that change is inherent to the human condition. Approaching the past and present from many different angles, A Skeletal Wand is a refreshing look at the constants that inform modern life.

AUTHOR

Ruth Roach Pierson

Ruth Roach Pierson has taught women?s history, feminist, European and post-colonial studies at the University of Toronto and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Since retiring in 1980, she has published three poetry collections: Where No Window Was, 2002, Aide-Mémoire, which was a Governor General Literary Award for Poetry finalist in 2008, and CONTRARY, 2011. In spring 2014, Guernica Editions published an anthology of film poems she edited entitled I Found It at the Movies. Aperture, her chapbook of poems written in response to the photography of Josef Sudek, was launched in July 2014. Realignment is her fourth poetry collection.