Sina Queyras
Biography
Sina Queyras is the author of three collections of poetry including Lemon Hound, which won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Her fourth collection of poetry, Expressway, will be published by Coach House in 2009. In 2005 she edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets for Persea Books, and from 2005 to 2006 she co-curated the belladonna reading series in New York. She has taught at Poets House, Rutgers and Haverford, and is currently Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary. She recently completed a collection of short fiction titled A Story With Severe Anxiety & Other Stories and is working on a novel titled Autobiography of Childhood.
Poet's Note
Lemon Hound is a response to and in some ways a continuation of the investigations of modernist foremothers Woolf and Stein. It is also an exploration of the sentence, of the desire to document, an attempt to capture something of the abundant and complex materiality of contemporary life (particularly the lives of women) by offering extended “takes,” textual reengagements and assemblages. Expressway is in some ways a continuation of this, though here I reach back to the romantics in trying to grapple with the present, and to find a way of looking forward. The question is how can we imagine a future in a world based on capital and mobility when capital and mobility pose such a threat to the world? How can we even ask this question? And is language, or the deadening of it, part of the problem? Can language (and indeed form) be part of the solution? If so how? I am interested in rhythms, repetition, and in layering and heightening language, in using found language, and in querying the manufacturing of it; but I am also interested in creating a sense of spaciousness, in multiple lines of inquiry existing simultaneously, in allowing intellectual ruggedness, perhaps even naiveté into the text.
Sample Work
from Expressway (at Mipoesias)
“Moments as Ripe as Cherries” from Lemon Hound (at How2)
“Gertrude Stein Gives a Speech to the Future” (at Delirious Hem)
Six Stories from A Story With Severe Anxiety & Other Stories (at This Magazine)
External Links
A review of Lemon Hound by Jordan Davis at Constant Critic
A review of Lemon Hound by Erin McFarland at Verse
Queyras's blog