The Counting House

Akin to a bookkeeper’s accounting of what’s given and taken in a fraught, uncertain exchange, The Counting House goes on to record the pageantry and pedantry of courtly affection gone awry. Symbols and origins of traditional rhymes involving kings and queens serve as inventory, alongside elements of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In forensic sequences of inquisition, scrutiny, and reckoning, Ridley reveals the maiden as muse as modern darling ï¿½ unhoused and exacting ï¿½ in “all of her violet forms.”

AUTHOR

Sandra Ridley

SANDRA RIDLEY is the author of several books of poetry including Vixen, Silvija, a finalist for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize, and The Counting House. She has been nominated for and won many prizes including the bpNichol Chapbook Award, a Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing, and the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. Ridley has taught at Sage Hill Writing, Carleton University, and has been a mentor with Ottawa’s Supportive Housing and Mental Health Services “Footprints to Recovery” program for people living with mental illness. Her work has been anthologized and translated into German and French. Sandra grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan and lives in Ottawa.

Reviews

“Sandra Ridley has revealed our closest contradictions in poems where harm is exhausted in both pleasure and pain. These poems find a blackbird baked into a pie, and our own drooling expectation of dessert, the edible object, is replaced by the excitement of the bird that escapes it, somehow alive. We revel in the spectre of the creature’s death and resurrection. How close we are to pain and destruction here, but Ridley surprises us with life that stubbornly and lovingly continues. In language that soothes and bites word by word, The Counting House is a book that lives fiercely in the complex in-between of love and punishment, pleasure and pain, coo and cry.” —Jenny Sampirisi

“The diversity of language is marvelous, and Ridley’s deeper humanistic concerns – about devalued subjects crashing forward into a condition of self-declaration – emerge through these poetic sequences intensely, and bravely.” —Margaret Christakos

“Ridley means business, and her fierce application of lyrical craft and formal innovation to her subject render all of her books as stirringlyevocative and cohesive works. Her most recent collection

The Counting House is no exception…” —Jacket2