Dust or Fire

By Alyda Faber

Is this life a route or a destination?

Alyda Faber's assured début examines the ties that bind us to one another and to the Earth we inhabit, and asks the question, What is left of us when we are gone?

In the quiet and unsettling poems of Dust or Fire, Faber speaks from the grief following death to explore the meaning of love and family. She is not afraid of gaps and ellipses, finding music in the silences. Her unflinching gaze explores the imperfections of our fleeting existence, our ambitions and relationships, our flawed humanity. Documenting the search for home, the longing to belong, to love and be loved, she turns to the ways love can curve toward pain, how we carelessly hurt one another, but also how we find the grace to forgive and carry on. Dust or Fire is a moving collection, at once grounding and uplifting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: Oct 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780864929426

Alyda Faber

Alyda Faber is the author of Dust or Fire, Berlinale Erotik, and Poisonous If Eaten Raw. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Riddle Fence, the Malahat Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and the Fiddlehead. She teaches at the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax.

Book preview

What is left of us when we are gone?

In this assured debut collection, Alyda Faber examines the ties that bind us to one another and to the Earth we inhabit. Her unflinching gaze explores the imperfections of our fleeting existence, our ambitions, our relationships, our flawed humanity. In these quiet, sometimes unsettling poems, she documents the search for home, the longing to belong, to love, and to be loved. She also turns to the ways love can curve toward pain: how we carelessly hurt one another, yet find the grace to forgive and carry on.

To open the pages of Alyda Faber’s Dust or Fire is to embark on a questing journey into the fragmentary elusiveness of family history, the threatened survival of Frisian — the language of Friesland — and the precariousness of life itself. Along the way, the reader is repeatedly left breathless by the shimmering images and the intricately clever metaphoric wordplay Faber wields in her remarkably accomplished debut poetry collection.

— Ruth Roach Pierson, author of Realignment

Family and its aftermath, how to honour the devastation and save the girl? Circling around her parents’ meeting in a Frisian train station, Alyda Faber, at turns austere and lyric, elliptical and direct, zeroes in on love and fear until the atom splits. She gifts us with some of the best writing about family by a Canadian poet in many years.

— John Barton, author of Polari

CAUTION:

This e-book contains poetry. Before the invention of writing and books, and long before the harnessing of electricity, poetry roamed the earth. Poetry adapted to the book and welcomed the electric light (with which it could be read longer hours). Poetry is still uneasy about the recent invention of the e-book and does not always respond well to the dynamic environment an e-book reader offers.

To set your poetry at ease, and to ensure the best possible reading experience, we recommend the following settings for your e-book reader:

Different typefaces (fonts) can change the length of lines and the relationships between characters on the rendered page. If you can change the typeface on your reading device, choose one that you find pleasing to the eye, but we recommend the following for the best results: for Apple iPad (iBooks), use Original or Charter; for Kobo devices or apps, use the Publisher Default, Amasis, or Baskerville; for Kindle devices or apps, use Baskerville, if it is available.

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You will find the ideal settings for your device if you experiment on a poem with long lines and observe where the lines break and the visual shape of the poem starts