Poetry in Motion: Winter’s Cold Girls

In Winter’s Cold Girls (Caitlin Press, 2019), Lisa Baird’s debut collection of poetry, she explores themes of trauma and recovery, everyday violence and queerness from a personal point of view as well as a wider political scope. In a poetic style shifting from lyric to deeply personal to the fantastical, Winter’s Cold Girls bears witness to the resilience of bodies and sexualities and are grounded in an earthy humour. Anna Swanson said Lisa’s voice is “fierce, queer, accessible, and alchemical … [with] a way of speaking about violence that serves not as a reliving but as a retrieval of power, a form of resistance.” Gwen Benaway said, “her dazzling, precise lines reveal a vital poetics that grows out of ordinary landscapes to transform the text into a balm for insight, healing, and articulation.”Lisa Baird’s previous poetry has appeared in various literary journals and she is a contributor to the Lambda Literary Award–winning anthology The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Healthcare (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) and to GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times. Winter’s Cold Girls is published by Dagger Editions, an imprint of Caitlin Press established in 2016 to spotlight the stories and voices of queer female-identifying writers.  Lisa reads “The Taxidermist” from her collection Winter’s Cold Girls.Lisa said “The Taxidermist” grew out of a writing prompt: “Tell the story of what happened by telling a different story. Lie your way to the truth.”  Lisa reads “Windbreak” from her collection Winter’s Cold Girls.Inspired by Anna Swanson’s Garbage Poems (www.garbagepoems.com), “which are written entirely from words transcribed from garbage found at swimming holes,” says Lisa, she wrote “Windbreak,” “using only words transcribed from the Hawthorn Farms seed catalogue.” It is one in a series of poems constructed from seed catalogues.# # #Lisa Baird is a poet, a community acupuncturist and a queer white settler living on the territories of the Attawandaron/Chonnonton people, and of the Mississaugas of the Credit Anishnaabek people—also known as Guelph, ON.