I’ll be the featured reader for Speaking Crow on June 1, 2021.
Speaking Crow is Winnipeg’s longest running poetry open mic series–really the longest poetry series of any kind in the city.
This will be an online event and registration is required. You can register here.
I hope to see and hear you there.
Thank you to everyone who attended the Zoom launch of Searching for Signal. I truly appreciate the support of Winnipeg’s literary community.
Special thanks to my “co-launchers” James Scoles (The Trailer) and Caroline Wong (Primal Sketches) and to Charlene Diehl, Director of the Thin Air/Winnipeg International Writers Festival, for keeping us in order and asking insightful questions about our collections.
Bringing a book to life takes many hands and I especially appreciate the work of my publisher Karen Haughian, my editor Clarise Foster, and Ashley Brekelmans for managing the launch and other marketing initiatives.
The event was recorded and will soon be available online for viewing.
Searching for Signal is available at many book retailers and online direct from Signature Editions.
Searching for Signal is a long poem that bears witness to the quotidian, disorienting shifts of grief as a father makes his way toward his death over three seasons.
This is mourning conducted in situ, the gift of observing one man quietly taking his leave and the impacted hole it leaves behind. The language is a mix of narrative lyric and fragmentary breath-spaced verse; the silences are his private silences, alluding to memory, family trauma, and shame. The hunter, the gatherer who never stopped trying for epiphanies, a daughter engaged in the same effort, frankly facing the span of a swift human lifetime that may pass without revelation or resolution.
If there is redemption, it is in the daughter bringing clarity to the physical condition of living and dying and the emotional intricacies of existence.
what do you say?
when I throw a wide net
of talking
hoping to catch the scaled skin
of something to hold
what do you think about?
all day
now books
now movies
have lost their meaning
nothing
you say
hours of
your silence
non-reflective
Searching for Signal left me breathless. This long poem has nothing — and everything — to do with my or your father.
All of Cayer’s unflinching, spare language, the heft of the silence, is “chokecherry rhubarb when you bit down.” Light a candle in mourning, in celebrations. Set it in the window while you read. Contemplate the depth of “repeating what we don’t know / came before.”
Reflect on your calendar.
Nora Gould
banging at the locked doors (town) (so small) she sent you to live in the locked cellar for a while fetching her potatoes was unsettling your cot and raggedy blankets down there you were that father trenched unspoken buffering detonations tornado word hurlings this is pattern recognition is gene pool unsubmerged
Searching for Signal is Lori Cayer’s fifth poetry collection.
Her previous books are Mrs Romanov–which was shortlisted for the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Prix Lansdowne de poésie, Dopamine Blunder, Attenuations of Force–also shortlisted for the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Prix Lansdowne de poésie. Her first collection, Stealing Mercury, was a finalist for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the winner of the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book in Manitoba.
Lori is a past winner of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer.
She is co-founder of the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/Prix Lansdowne de poésie and was a poetry editor for Contemporary Verse 2.
Lori has lived her whole life on the now verdant bed of a glacial lake.
Lori Cayer 