Richard Therrien | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

"My emptiness will not be
frenetic with the friction
of my father's silences
but still as the unmarked graves
of his many forgotten selves"
—From "Salt"

A cycle of poems, Sleeping in Tall Grass takes an unsparing look at a painful, sometimes abusive, yet strangely redemptive family story enfolded within the body of the Canadian prairie itself—at once physical, historical, and metaphysical. These intensely personal poems reflect the complex relationships between sound and space, language and silence. Treating time as more layered than sequential, they reflect a process of organic composition distilled from Therrien's iterative observations and utterances. This is writing that reaches "into the very grain of existence"—a sonorous re-presentation of the human presence on the dispassionate but eternally giving plains.