Outside, America

By Sarah de Leeuw

Outside, America criss-crosses the Canadian–American border to understand dilemmas that occur across a variety of scales, from global spheres to the most intimate domestic spaces. Sarah de Leeuw digs through grief, loss, aging, technological frustration, environmental degradation, nationalism and confusion to grasp the state of the world. These poems are tethered to everything from climate change and scientific discovery to the death of parents, resource extraction, divorce and career changes, touching down on whale extinctions, lounges in international airports and debris slides, on suiciding pilots and sinkholes, astronauts, grocery store magazines, earthquakes and even sinking ferries and pop stars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780889711433

Sarah de Leeuw

Sarah de Leeuw is an award-winning Canadian writer and researcher whose books include Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 (NeWest Press, 2004), Front Lines: Portraits of Caregivers in Northern British Columbia (Creekstone Press, 2011), Geographies of a Lover (NeWest Press, 2012), Skeena (Caitlin Press, 2015) and Where it Hurts (NeWest Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction and a finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional BC Book Prize. She lives in Prince George, BC.

Book preview

Outside

Rogue Stars

Think about Lite-Brite says the mit post-doctoral scientist.

How even if we can’t see it, there’s still light behind

the opaque, black paper.

Our galaxies are like the pegs punched through that paper.

Bright and easy to spot, taking up all the attention.

But there’s still light.

Behind the opaque, black paper.

So much light we can’t see, focusing just on the holes.

Which makes me think about glossy, thin-papered

entertainment magazines.

The ones in the grocery store.

With the stars who take up my attention.

When I’m buying tuna or a plastic box of pre-washed spinach.

When I want to be thinking something profound. Something

poetic.

About my father who passed away.

About the snow touching warm car hoods in the parking lot

outside, disappearing.

About the hands of a man who carves stone in the Arctic,

a documentary I saw.

But those galaxies are so easy to spot.

Being one of them. Obvious.

Oblivious to the light behind the black.

October Chanterelling

Listen, my father says standing

downslope from the hiking trail trying

to teach me about details, about

being careful, so really he means look,

pointing out moss separating where a nurse

log lifts as it rots, shrinks, shifts skyward,

an opening for leaf buildup,

for mushrooms in semi-sandy close

to coastal soil covered with hemlock

needles, dead devil’s club, the odd

softened, yellowed skunk cabbage

decaying beside tea-coloured, tannin

creeks flowing beachward, the sea

stretching to Japan from where

my father never tires of telling me,

those salt-roughened turquoise glass

balls float to us, how distance

is really small if you account for currents,

how no matter how long and strong

the lichen looks, it remains fragile,

how one should not rip out