The capacity of the rediscovered world to signal and illuminate, restore and repair, fuels the poems in Every Shameless Ray. In Every Shameless Ray, it’s more often possible to find one’s way when headed somewhere else. Intellectually curious, emotionally acute and playful in form, these poems rely upon the unreliable — the accidents and reversals that expose prescriptive narratives of war and patterns of desire. In poems about a child’s misunderstood words and the shock of a Matisse painting, habits of perception are interrupted and disrupted. Liminal spaces open up — in the movements of a to-be-lover’s hands as he eases out the under-row of slick black papaya seeds, or when a tipped-over kayaker rides a river’s current upside-down. The heart may ache, grave illness threaten, war rage and art tear down its foundations, but a shameless calling, a fine disorder persistently reveals new realities. In a time of social and political disruption, these poems explore and engage personal, social, and political realms intimately, contemplatively, and in protest.

Born in Winnipeg and raised in Ontario, France, and Germany, Leslie Timmins discovered her love of visual art and architecture early in life, later finding a similar appeal in the raw beauty of wilderness. Activism, and a decades-long meditation practice, provide other engines that fire up her award-winning poetry. Her poems have appeared in fine magazines in Canada and the U.S., in the anthologies Global Poetry (2011), A Verse Map of Vancouver (2009), Sustenance (2017), and in her chapbook The Limits of Windows (2015). She reviews books for Event magazine and has written articles and essays for Canadian Living and The Globe and Mail, among other publications. She lives in Vancouver and Saturna Island with her husband.

Leslie Timmins' profile page