Head Full of Sun

Head Full of Sun celebrates poetry and language’s rich spiritual heritage by weaving together the biblical and the personal. Carla Funk uses biblical forms and stories to explore the human condition and give blood and bone to the spiritual. These poems lament, question and sing praise as they wrestle with the divine.In the main component of this collection, Funk has created an “Alphabet of Psalms” that works to find a song in every corner of Earth’s many rooms. These twenty-six poems are modelled after Psalm 119, which uses each letter of the Hebrew alphabet for its twenty-two segments. In another section, Funk pulls the lives of biblical women from the background, giving them the opportunity to articulate the untold portion of the story. And finally, she takes on Revelations, a book that inspired sermons that terrified her as a child but which she has come to appreciate as a “richly poetic book with imagery to envy.”From Eve in Eden to the apocalyptic imagery of Revelations, Funk translates theology into a convincing and down-to-earth human tongue, pushing through the veil for an intimate look at God.

AUTHOR

Carla Funk

Carla Funk grew up in Vanderhoof, in the central interior of BC. She completed her BFA in writing and her MA in English Literature at the University of Victoria, where she currently teaches. Her first poetry collection, Blessing the Bones into Light (Coteau) appeared in 1999 and her poems have also been featured in the anthologies Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets (Harbour, 1995), Hammer & Tongs: A Smoking Lung Anthology (2000) and Introductions (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2001), and as part of Translink’s Poetry in Transit project.

Reviews

“[Carla] Funk’s Head Full of Sun contains an effective series of particular women (Goliath’s wife, Eve, Ruth, Jezebel), and a work that is at once a brilliant comedy and a serious meditation called ‘Alphabet of Psalms,’ which at one point poignantly reads: ‘when the words become lies and the lies/ wear the names of people I know/ I want to believe they . . . / leave the room and page thinking/ that poem is about me/ she means me/ I want her to mean me.”-W.H. New, Canadian Literature
– Canadian Literature

“Her writing is achingly lovely. Her images are unexpected windows to tenderness and terror, and her ear is blessed with perfect pitch.”-George Sipos, Connections Magazine”…the internal rhyme, the phonic weave of Funk’s words wrap these lines around themselves, sounds echo, resonate as if in that hollow palace… Funk’s writing is sensual and rich, tactile.”-Marnie Parsons, University of Toronto Quarterly”Most memorable [from the bestselling anthology Hammer & Tongs] is Carla Funk’s series of Solomon’s Wives poems which creates a Middle-Eastern world replete with sensory and sensual details.”-Ibi Kaslik, Danforth Review
– Praise for Carla Funk