Out of dried tears and burnt matter comes fertile ground, new nourishment. A woman traveller walks up and down a mountain, back and forth through a quarter of Grenoble over the course of many months, experiencing anticipatory grief and later bereavement over the loss of a spouse. With little to anchor her, claim her, as she walks poems begin to seek her out. Poems of dislocation, cultural migration, rage, healing and transformation spring forth and set root – poems that transform the vocabulary of science, its language and concepts, into poems that encounter the natural world with an intensity and clarity that direct us to the core of our humanity and the tender parts of our being.

These poems are crafted out of the language of dreams, mythologies, and inventions. Laced with subtle humour, irony and surprising turns, they return us to the place of origin seen anew. Like the egg and bitter herbs dipped in salt at the Seder Table, they remind us that beyond pain and grief, the only peace we have is the one we construct for ourselves.

Adrienne Drobnies has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley; she has worked at Simon Fraser University and the Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver. Her origins are in Texas and California and she has spent most of her life in Toronto and Vancouver. A graduate of the Simon Fraser University Writer's Studio, her poetry has appeared in Canadian literary magazines, including The Antigonish Review, Event, Riddle Fence, The Toronto Quarterly, and The Maynard, as well as The Cider Press Review and Sow's Ear's Review in the US, and Popshot Magazine in the UK. She is an editor of a collection of poetry in French, Poèmes sur Mesure, by Alain Fournier. Her poetry has received honourable mention in the Compton Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Vallum Award for poetry. Her long poem "Randonnées" won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Award for Best Suite of Poems by an Emerging Poet and was a finalist for the CBC literary award for poetry.

Adrienne Drobnies' profile page