Sylvia Legris

Moving through somnambulant states, Sleep Gate evokes Inger Christensen's description of the necessity for us to 'dream our way inward'. The poems in Sleep Gate push Christensen’s 'dream inward' further, into biological dreaming itself. Fully absorbed in the fabric of sleep, enfolded into the 'inventory of dreams', these poems become part of the process of sleep respiration, so that we might consider the world around us from another perspective. Moving through the changing states of peoples’ 'dreamscapes' and what might affect them, like nightmares, insomnia and other sleep disorders, Sleep Gate captures the disjunctive, jump-cutting quality of dreams: within the unspoken context of 'deep-sleep tectonic logic', these poems jump from a time before 'the clouds are inventoried' to the present, from 'Winter’s gnashing bruxism' to a 'garden anointed with gluey residue.' A collection that, as on waking, assembles the world through distortion and towards clarity.

Self-seeding windis a wind of ever-replenishing breath.-from 'The Walk, or The Principle of Rapid Peering'The title of Sylvia Legris' melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behaviour of certain birds. Rather than waiting passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of 'rapid peering'. Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray of poems that together form a kind of almanac or naturalist's notebook in verse. Here is 'where nature converges with words,' as the poet walks through prairie habitats near her home in Saskatchewan, through lawless chronologies and mellifluous strophes of strobili and solstice. Moths appear frequently, as do birds and plants and larvae, all meticulously observed and documented with an oblique sense of the pandemic marking the seasons. Elements of weather, ornithology, entomology, and anatomy feed her condensed, inflective lines, making the heart bloom and the intellect dance.Features drawings by the poet.

The first four collections in our revitalized Poetry Pamphlet series, established to highlight original work from writers around the world as well as forgotten treasures lost in the cracks of literary history. Included are: Two American Scenes: Our Village & A Journey on the Colorado River, by Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger; Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Chris Marker, by Susan Howe; The Helens of Troy, New York, by Bernadette Mayer; and Pneumatic Antiphonal, by Sylvia Legris.

Exceptional collection from established Canadian poet writing nature and the politics of the garden and ecology in an utterly new form.

Sylvia Legris's Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world's most cherished pastimes: Gardening "At the center of the garden the heart," she writes, "Red as any rose. Pulsing / balloon vine. Love in a puff." As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris's poems map the garden as body and the body as garden--her words at home in the phytological and anatomical--like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky's "80 Flowers." In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation--spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.

In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy. Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci’s Anatomical Manuscripts, the dermatologist Robert Willan’s On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue. The Hideous Hidden boldly celebrates anatomy’s wonders: “Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals. / Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen.”

Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlets" series, Pneumatic Antiphonal is a fun, humming, bio-physiological word-whizzing flight into birdsong penned by young Canadian poet, Sylvia Legris — her first publication in the U.S. An excerpt: The theory of corpuscular flight is the cardinal premise of red birds carrying song-particles carrying oxygen. Erythrocytic. Sticky. Five quarts of migration.

Nerve Squall is a field guide like no other, a surreal handbook to a landscape at the crossroads of meteorology and neurology, where the electrical storms without and the electrical impulses within converge. Legris's fascination with weather, ghosts and brain disorders is the starting point for a collection of poetry that ensures you'll never look at nature the same way again. You'll find snow golems and ghost cats, and a sky filled with fish swimming the winds of a storm. And you'll find a haunted terrain where the natural world becomes an allegory for our most intimate fears. Despite their dark and often cinematic approach, these poems are also tinged with a sly, apocalyptic wit that can't help but laugh as the sky falls. Nerve Squall is a vital exploration of the symbiosis of storm, nerve and language, a sure-handed guide to the end of the world.

circuitry of veins explores the relationships between women and their bodies, their families and society. Legris captures, like a photographer, the art of poetry, the essence of language, and the emotive powers of words set side by side in ink. "...reaches a kind of almost classical perfection." --Prairie Fire "A beautifully written and politically layered exploration." --Feminist Bookstore News "Frightening, funny, breathtaking--poems that haunt you." --Betsy Warland