My Mother Joins the Resistance

All there is, is light and darkness and wonder.
And in that moment, there is no difference, either,
between love and the memory of love. – “Up Above the World”

In this latest collection Richard Harrison has created a companion to his Governor General Award–winning collection On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. In My Mother Joins the Resistance, Harrison considers his mother’s life – from her time as a child during WWII’s Operation Pied Piper, up until its end, in 2017, when terminally ill with cancer, she chose MAiD – with elegant, deeply felt poetry. These are beautiful poems, ones that piece together a person, a life and a family over generations. These are poems that examine the wounds passed down through a family, alongside the love, and see the echoes of both – the wounds and the love – in the world around us.

AUTHOR

Richard Harrison

Richard Harrison is the author of 5 books of poetry including Hero of the Play: 10th Anniversary Edition, and Big Breath of a Wish which won the City of Calgary/W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and was a finalist for the Governor-Generals Award for Poetry for 1999. Richards poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. His essays as well as writings on his work have appeared in several academic publications as well as in The Globe and Mail, The Manchester Guardian and The New York Times. Richard lives in Calgary with his wife Lisa and their children, Emma and Keeghan, and he teaches English and Creative Writing at Mount Royal College.