A Different Species of Breathing: The Poetry of Sue Goyette

By Sue Goyette, Bart Vautour and Erin Wunker

What can it look like for poetry to bear witness? What might it feel like for a poem to keep company? A Different Species of Breathing: The Poetry of Sue Goyette offers an introduction to the work of a poet whose writing attends to these large and connected questions.

Goyette’s poetry experiments with (and pushes at the edges of) lyric poetry to explore webs of connection. Whether considering the ways in which systems of care fail children, the devastating reach of Big Pharma, the reciprocal relationship between oceans and humans, or the possibilities that rest in rewriting one’s own story, Goyette’s poetry is rooted in the work of witnessing and being in company with others.

A Different Species of Breathing opens with an introduction by scholar, editor, and poet Bart Vautour, which offers readers context for Goyette’s lyric innovations as well as her key poetic concerns. A selection chosen from across Goyette’s published work then presents readers with poems that appear in chronological order to ground readers in the poet’s trajectories of thinking. The volume closes with a new and previously unpublished interview between Goyette and scholar and writer Erin Wunker. For scholars, poetry aficionados, students, and those interested in questions of care, connection, and ecosystems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771125826

Sue Goyette

Sue Goyette lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has published three books of poems, The True Names of Birds, Undone and outskirts (Brick Books) and a novel, Lures (HarperCollins, 2002). Her fourth collection of poems, Ocean, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press in 2013. She's been nominated for several awards including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther, the Gerald Lampert, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and won the 2008 CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the 2010 Earle Birney Prize and the 2011 Bliss Carman Award. Her poetry has appeared on the Toronto subway system, in wedding vows and spray-painted on a sidewalk somewhere in Saint John, New Brunswick. Sue currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University, is faculty for the Banff Wired Writing Studio and works part-time at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

Book preview

Cover: A Different Species of Breathing, the poetry of Sue Goyette; selected with an introduction by Bart Vautour. The cover image shows white markings on a dark page.

A Different Species of Breathing

The Poetry of Sue Goyette

A Different Species of Breathing

The Poetry of Sue Goyette

Selected

with an

introduction by

Bart Vautour

and an

interview with Sue Goyette

by Erin Wunker

Logo: LPS, Laurier poetry series. WLU press, Wilfrid Laurier, University Press.Logo: Laurier, Inspiring lives.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Funding provided by the Government of Ontario and the Ontario Arts Council. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

Logo: Canada. Logo: Ontario arts council. Logo: Canada Council for the Arts.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: A different species of breathing : the poetry of Sue Goyette / selected with an introduction by Bart Vautour and an interview with Sue Goyette by Erin Wunker.

Other titles: Poems. Selections (2023)

Names: Goyette, Sue, author. | Vautour, Bart, editor. | Wunker, Erin, interviewer.

Series: Laurier poetry series.

Description: Series statement: Laurier poetry series | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2022049827X | Canadiana (ebook) 20220498318 | ISBN 9781771125819 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771125826 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771125833 (PDF)

Classification: LCC PS8563.O934 A6 2023 | DDC C811/.54—dc23

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Front cover image: Variable Retention by Lou Sheppard. This is a graphic score of composed spectrograms (sound images) of vulnerable, threatened, and endangered bird species found in a proposed clear cut (variable retention) in southwestern Nova Scotia / Kespukwitk, Mi’kma’ki. These bird species include Bicknell’s Thrush, Canada Warbler, Common Nighthawk, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Eastern Whip-poor-will, Olive-sided Flycatcher, and Rusty Blackbird.

Cover design by Gary Blakeley.

Interior design by Mike Bechthold.

© 2023 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press is located on the Haldimand Tract, part of the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabe, and Neutral Peoples. This land is part of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe Peoples and symbolizes the agreement to share, to protect our resources, and not to engage in conflict. We are grateful to the Indigenous Peoples who continue to care for and remain interconnected with this land. Through the work we publish in partnership with our authors, we seek to honour our local and larger community relationships, and to engage with the diversity of collective knowledge integral to responsible scholarly and cultural exchange.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Tanis MacDonald

Biographical Note

Introduction: Sue Goyette and the Building of Intimate Publics, Bart Vautour

from The True Names of Birds (1998)

The True Names of Birds

Again to Be a Daughter

Women Drinking Tea or Tequila

from Undone (2004)

For Women Who Cry When They Drive

Back When We’d Try Anything to Fix It

On Hearing Elizabeth Bishop Read Her Crusoe in England

from Outskirts (2011)

Heavy Metal Night at Gus’s Pub

The New Mothers

Mission

Clear-cut: one

Bargaining

from Ocean (2013)

Prologue [We traded an accordion of hours for wood…]

Two [It won every staring contest…]

Seven [We had laughed at first…]

Fifty-Six [Filmmakers had started making films of the ocean…]

from The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl (2015)

One [The girl refused to be afraid…]

Fifteen [The girl’s ghost was not necessarily a ghost…]

Forty [The girl’s bear heard the ghost of the girl’s roar…]

Fifty-Eight [The bear had the ghost of the girl…]

Fifty-Nine [When the mother and bear faced each other…]

from Penelope: In First Person (2017)

[I wake to visitors at the door…]

[I wake to a swarm of suitors…]

[I wake to a vision of Odysseus…]

[I wake hungover, my sullen tongue a warp…]

[The door wakes to Telemachus…]

[The suitors wake to me…]

[I awake, I woke…]

[My tongue wakes…]

[I wake to watch us…]

from Anthesis: A Memoir (2020)

[Burning flowers: prepare for the next season…]

[Fuck waiting to meet the swerve…]

[She straightened her girl and ran…]

[up to? She was tempted…]

[She could write a book about watching…]

[She looked back only once…]

from Solstice 2020: An Archive (2021)

December 6

December 9

December 18

Afterword: An interview with Sue Goyette and Erin Wunker

Acknowledgements

Foreword

I am happy to serve as the general editor for the Laurier Poetry Series, the development and growth of which I have followed from its early days. My gratitude goes to Neil Besner and Brian