A Canadian Poet To Watch

Shoshanna Wingate is hotly tipped for great things by Patrick Warner:

Ultimately, it is the lived-in quality of Wingate’s poems, the authenticity that comes from tough negotiation with experience and with poetic form that makes her work a valuable recent contribution to Canadian poetry, a poetry which, in 2015, is overly-indebted to affected language, to literary theory and to the incomprehensible. Among the wash of contemporary poems, many of which read as non sequitur followed by non sequitur, Wingate’s poems stand out for their realism, for their narrative candor, for their emotional heft, and (contradictory as it may sound) for their restraint.

Sunday Poem

RADIO WEATHER 

When there should be snow there is rain, rain, rain,
then ice, then rain. The radio host asks 

call-in listeners if they think this a sign
of climate change. Old timers hit speed dial,

side-step the point, eager to talk storms,
lives marked by weather, recall jumping out 

of windows when the doors were blocked with snow,
the hospitals filled up with broken backs— 

What does it mean? The questions gather. Oh,

I have another story, a good one.
This storm flooded the town then froze it in

its shell; each home a snow globe of its own.
That one felled trees older than most houses; 

rain pummeled us for days until the roads
gave way, just buckled, the ground beneath us 

heaved and upended, water everywhere
devouring the road as if it were a sandcastle; 

took bridges too, whole towns unglued, adrift,
now islands of their own. Weather serves up

memory better than any book.
Who likes to think about means and ends,

how things change so slowly until they snap?
We fear our maps outdated, pencil sketches 

on onion skin. Our stories, though,
tell us who we are.

From Radio Weather (Signal Edition, 2014) by Shoshanna Wingate 

Outcast Perspective

Kerri Cull asks Shoshanna Wingate about the peripatetic nature of her childhood and its influence on her first book, Radio Weather:

“This wandering lifestyle meant I didn’t have a static set of images or experiences to draw from. I didn’t even have a consistent personality. I had chaos. Fractured memories. Home was not a place—it was a yearning.” This outcast perspective shows in Shoshanna’s poetry. The dual sides to every story, the different ways one can look at the world and truth. “I wanted to write poetry that rested between certainties, as life did, without resorting to literary games or tricks. Memory is elastic, so why pretend it’s neat and tidy?”

The Murderer

In June, the Nickel Film Festival in St. John's screened the results of the first-ever cinepoetry project which paired local filmmakers with local poets to create short films. One of those films, The Murderer, was based on the same-titled poem by Shoshanna Wingate that's included in her debut, Radio Weather.

Titillating Material

Shoshanna Wingate discusses the experience of working on her first book, Radio Weather:

“There are so many writers, especially when they’re young, who use titillating material as a way of getting attention for their work, and that’s what I was afraid of,” she explained. “I was afraid of using murderers and AIDS and I was afraid that if I didn’t have the skills to do it well, it was just going to be a wreck.

Sunday Poem

NEW YEAR'S DAY

Others speak. They call for time
to come meet them. We do not

speak. We rest. We look
for nothing and do not stretch

to find ourselves different
in the new year. We lie together

under wool blankets, the baby kicks
my back, pads my shoulder

with her fingers, roots for what is hidden
until she cries herself awake.

I lift my shirt, eyes closed, and offer her
my breast and she squirms into me.

My leg moves sideways to find
his warm leg. We three knot ourselves

together in sleep, content in
knowing what we’ll find when we awake.

From Homing Instinct (Frog Hollow Press, 2011) by Shoshanna Wingate