I have to live

A new collection ablaze with urgency and radiant inquiry from a 2015 finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry


I have to live exists in the conceptual overlap between the "I" that is not confessional but turned out to the world and the desire for a "living privacy" that refuses the violence of the look. This is a poetry that enacts emotional intelligence; it employs the body and the sensory as modes of inquiry--because they are. In this way, in an unequivocal, decolonizing gesture, the "I" of these poems re-sees what it''s been trained to un-see. The speaker of these poems is her own scientist, her own forensic authority, because the information she''s been handed cannot be trusted. The result is pained, just, and ecstatic.