Fish Bones

By Gillian Sze

2009

First Published

4.37

Average Rating

Number of Pages

2H26M

Audio Length

In Fish Bones, Gillian Sze takes a random walk through the art museum and finds the drama of life framed in a series precisely rendered and moving artefact poems. Working from Jeanette Winterson's idea of a "constant exchange of emotion" between the artist, the painting, and the writer, Sze's ekphrastic verse is unrelenting in its commitment to action, so that each poem sparked by a picture comes to follow its own impetus, the origin of which is always a deeply felt encounter, whether familial, erotic, or strange. Vacillating deftly between the suspended space-time of a museum exhibit and the charged urgency of the lives she imagines via the art she describes, the result is a collection at once stirring and arresting, tender and coolly true.

Avg Rating

4.37

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

52%

4 STARS

33%

3 STARS

15%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Gillian Sze

Author · 12 books

GILLIAN SZE is the author of Panicle (ECW Press, 2017), Peeling Rambutan (Gaspereau Press, 2014) and Redrafting Winter (BuschekBooks, 2015), which were shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of The Anatomy of Clay (ECW Press, 2011) and Fish Bones (DC Books, 2009). More recently, she has started writing for children. Her first two picture books are The Night Is Deep and Wide (Orca, 2021) and My Love for You Is Always (Philomel, 2021). Gillian's work has appeared in a number of national and international journals, and has received awards such as the University of Winnipeg Writers’ Circle Prize and the 3Macs carte blanche Prize. She studied Creative Writing and English Literature and received a Ph.D. in Études anglaises from Université de Montréal. Originally from Winnipeg, she now resides in Montreal.