Eyes Like Pigeons, Roberta Rees’ long poem, comes back, always, to this: … Thi’ in Vietnamese means poetry.” Thi, a Vietnamese refugee, is this book’s associational matrix; playing with the possibilities of her name, Rees writes of Thi, poetry both self-reflexive and self-reflective, and immensely different from that which idealizes women with cliches like the title of this volume. The poetry she finds through Thi is as harsh as it is beautiful; its content as sorrowful as the style is liberating, joyful.

CO-WINNER of the 1992 Gerald Lampert Award from the League of Canadian Poets WINNER of the 1992 Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry