Welcome to Litsy!

Poetry. In her first collection, THIN AIR OF THE KNOWABLE, the physical landscapes of Wendy Donawa's life--West Coast, Caribbean, prairies--ground many of her poems and often reflect the inner geography of her preoccupations. A road-trip poem moves from prairie winter, "an icy scatter of gravel / the moving centre of this unpeopled world," past a cattle liner on its way to the slaughter house, but it also passes beneath the sky's "blazing scroll of light," and magpies "flashing black and teal in the sun." Landscape also functions metaphorically to suggest how historical settings play out in the exigencies of individual lives. Other preoccupations include poems that reflect on poesis itself--the strange poem-making compulsion to capture that which is largely inexpressible (hence "the thin air of the knowable"), and the role of dreams, memory, and intuition in shaping a poem's knowledge.