Notes on Leaving

Notes on Leaving is a debut poetry collection that is every bit as captivating, emotive and razor-sharp as Laisha Rosnau’s bestselling first novel The Sudden Weight of Snow. Rosnau’s poignant poems address life in a startlingly direct and honest voice, employing a robust combination of jaw-dropping forthrightness and delicately crafted verse.The language of Notes on Leaving is brusque, bright and instinctively fluid: lines and words flow and merge as naturally as they collide head-on. In the world-weary persona of someone who has always found herself on the run (“my mind was farther away than farm and field. . . “), and “prone to breakdowns/ of all kinds,” Rosnau energetically conveys sexually charged and angst-ridden desires to urgently abandon a small-town upbringing, among various other lives and identities. She convincingly presents these primal urges as strikingly and sensuously familiar to us all, “tracing a route down your torso, thrumming south,/ the highway swelling with each town, until/ you round the last curve, a crescendo, and cross/ the river to a place where the city meets itself.” Cutting through time zones that encompass the rural and urban, the remembered and the forgotten, Rosnau reminds us to “Pay attention to your surroundings,” to “watch for potential road-kill,” and to “compare scars” along the way.

AUTHOR

Laisha Rosnau

Laisha Rosnau is the author of The Sudden Weight of Snow (McClelland and Stewart, 2002), which was an honourable mention for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Rosnau’s first collection of poetry, Notes on Leaving (Nightwood, 2004), won the 2005 Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award. Her second, Lousy Explorers (Nightwood, 2009), was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Her most recent book of poetry, Pluck (Nightwood, 2014), was nominated for the national Raymond Souster Award. Rosnau teaches fiction and poetry at UBC, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Film School and Okanagan College. She and her family are the resident caretakers of Bishop Wild Bird Sanctuary in Coldstream, BC.

Reviews

“Like her image of house-slips snagged on rough wrought-iron, Laisha Rosnau’s debut book of poems speaks of a world both knowing and delicate, in a voice that is brash, heart-felt, human . . .”-David O’Meara
– David O’Meara

“The poems in Notes on Leaving are as intimate and surprising as the delicacy of rolling moon ‘from tongue to tongue.’ Laisha Rosnau delivers her phrases with abandon and aims them where they count.”-Jay Ruzesky
– Jay Ruzesky

“The writing is finely crafted throughout, earthy yet lyrical. Rosnau is a talent to watch.”-Montreal Gazette”The Sudden Weight of Snow declares the arrival of an exciting new voice on the CanLit scene.”-Kitchener-Waterloo Record”Rosnau’s sensitive portrayal of the liminal world of adolescence captivates. . . . Deft, passionate. . . Rosnau is one writer whose book lives up to the jacket hype. . . . Fresh, original, funny and rife with insight. . . . A stunning debut.”-Toronto Star
– Praise for The Sudden Weight of Snow

“She writes this side of angry, unrepentantly… Bittersweet, brimming with sex and the need to be noticed, but not in a cheap and easy way.”-Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire
– Prairie Fire

“From childhood formation to youthful transformation, from teen sexuality to adult consciousness, from world travel to the intense and transient friendships formed in a post-modern world, Rosnau nails the human experience through the eyes of a persona who is wise-woman, smart-girl, and cynical innocent…”Readers will find these forty-plus poems insightful and accessible.”-Anne-Marie Oomen, ForeWord
– ForeWord