Wild Madder

By Brenda Leifso

Poems that stride bravely into the day-to-day, recovering the misdirected intensity at its core.

Brenda Leifso’s Wild Madder is about way-finding—through those moments in which you no longer recognize where you are. It’s about not knowing—who you are anymore, how to be in the world, how to love. It’s about what’s unspoken and about what speaks—conversation with the wild and animate world. It’s about marriage, family, motherhood—the drudgery in them and the quiet beauty.
This is lyric poetry wracked with pain, rage, and longing. In the beginning, the collection may read as though it’s been steeped in bitterness. Family can ask everything of a partner and parent and then turn around and take even more; Wild Madder feels like a note in a bottle washed up on the shores of a rough sea. But Leifso is not one to stand still or cling to darkness; in fact, we end up so far into the darkness that when she breaks through into light, it’s a conflagration of all the things that make us human.
These frank, bracingly recognizable poems will be irresistible—and cathartic—for anyone who has ever felt their life chewing them into little pieces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Jan 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771315081

Brenda Leifso

Brenda Leifso has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and was the executive editor of PRISM international. Her poetry has appeared in many journals, and has received the Bliss Carman Banff Centre Award for Poetry, as well as awards in the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival Writing Contest. She currently lives in Ottawa.

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