In
The Book of Marvels, award-winning poet Lorna Crozier offers a delightful series of prose meditations on household objects: everything from doorknobs, washing machines, rakes, and zippers to the kitchen sink. Operating as a kind of a literary detective, Crozier brings her rapt attention to the everyday things she explores, uncovering the mystery that lies at their essence. She offers tantalizing glimpses of the household’s inhabitants, too, probing hearts, brains, noses, and navels. Longing, exuberance, and grief colour her reflections on the familiar and the concrete, causing them at times to resemble folktales or parables.
Each of the vignettes in
The Book of Marvels stands alone, but the connections are intricate; as in life, each object gains meaning from its juxtaposition with others. Crozier approaches her investigations with a childlike curiosity, an adult bemusement, and an unfailing sense of metaphor and mischief. With both charm and mordant wit, she animates the panoply of wonders to be found everywhere around and in us.
O autorze
Lorna Crozier, one of Canada’s most celebrated poets, has read from her work on every continent. She has received numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Award, for her fifteen books of poetry, which include
The Blue Hour of the Day, What the Living Won’t Let Go, Everything Arrives at the Light and Inventing the Hawk, and her memoir,
Small beneath the Sky. She has also edited several anthologies, among them
Desire in Seven Voices and, with Patrick Lane,
Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast. She lives in Saanich, British Columbia.