Launch dates:
Saturday, June 22nd 7pm – Salt Spring Island Public Library
Thursday, July 25th 7pm – Fort Tectoria 777 Fort Street, Victoria
Friday, September 13th – Planet Earth Poetry, Russell Books Victoria
In the Warm Shallows of What Remains
Andrea Scott
The world is ending; there is a need for new stories “more happy than sad but still true.” And Andrea Scott has done it with innovative poems in various forms that offer hope while being clever, delightfully relatable, and expertly crafted. Beginning with a prose poem: “Dear P.K. Page re: care instructions for our beloved Planet Earth,” readers are invited to think about the earth and how “we haven’t loved it properly.” In “I Have Only Ever Been of This Earth,” the speaker dreams of flying while “thinking / happy things” with “echoes of Peter Pan.” While “The World Was Ending,” the poet “made soup to move along / three chicken carcasses in Ziplocs in the deep freeze.” Glosas include lines from Rumi, The Tragically Hip, Barbara Pelman, and P.K. Page who was a master of the form. And now we’ve met another master! We can’t wait for more people to read these poems and to become uplifted in the midst of it all.
— Mary Ann Moore and Ursula Vaira, from 2024 Raven judges’ citation
Plum trees, steakhouse neon, dolphins with gummy smiles, hailstones, sex with someone new. These poems surprise and delight at every turn, like a good energy bar chock full of umami for the soul.
— Susan Musgrave, author of Exculpatory Lilies
In poems rooted in earth and in family, friendship, and love, Andrea Scott digs into the issues that trouble us today with a humanity free of doom-scrolling self-pity. Her poetic touch is casual but not loose, festooned in specifics yet uncluttered, and driven by a gentle, unshowy humour she hopes is weaned off fossil fuels. She may have “a fishy feeling about the future,” especially the one her children face, yet by the end of In the Warm Shallows of What Remains she finds time to get down on her knees and optimistically put in her garden.
— John Barton, author of Lost Family: A Memoir
Is it elegy to write of a beloved mother, your own mothering self and mother earth? Is it ode and ballad too? Like the earthworm in her poem, Andrea Scott makes rich castings of life’s compostings: tire swing, fast semis, floods, fire, and flight among whisps of clouds, children, and digging in. She honours form and poets with an opening letter to P.K. Page, writes duplex, ghazal, zuihitsu and ends on P.K. Page with a glosa. These dense, loamy poems hang on the precipice of experience and innocence: what we bring into life and what leaves on stilled wind.
— Yvonne Blomer, author of The Last Show on Earth
Andrea Scott is a mother, writer and teacher living in Victoria, B.C., the traditional territory of the Lekwungen Peoples. Publications include The New Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, FreeFall, Geist, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Humber Literary Review and The Antigonish Review. She was longlisted for the 2023 Room Poetry Contest and the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. She won the 2022 Geist Erasure Poetry Contest and was a finalist for the FBCW 2022 Literary Contest and the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize.
Available at independent bookstores in your community, and by direct order through Raven Chapbooks: click here
ISBN: 978-1-7781603-5-6 | POETRY | $22.95 + shipping
