Oyama Pink Shale

By Sharon Thesen

Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award

Governor General's Literary Award finalist Sharon Thesen's Oyama Pink Shale is a sly, self-directed, yet joyously emancipatory work. By animating and voicing various moments and selves -- indebted adult friend to artists, cold documentarian of a haunted sanatorium, engaged contemporary ticking off beauties, among others -- Thesen's poems show the transience of the earthly moment while convincing us of the thread of spirit that links all our lost bits and makes them possible.

There's an uncontainable buoyancy and lift in the lines and quick-shifting frames as they swerve toward the darker, more gravid complexities of contemporary life. Oyama Pink Shale exhibits a love for both the quotidian and the oblique angle, and a singular talent for the music of cumulative wonder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Oct 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781770891623

Sharon Thesen

Sharon Thesen is the author The Good Bacteria, which was a finalist for the Governor General’ s Literary Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the ReLit Award, and seven previous collections of poetry. She received the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for her collection A Pair of Scissors and she has been for a finalist for the British Columbia Book Prize. She was born in Tisdale, Saskatchewan, and now lives in British Columbia, where she is a professor at University of British Columbia.

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