Corked

Corked
By Catriona Strang

Catriona Strang expertly “fabricates her own reality” in poems that explore the female condition and respond to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In a powerful and rare display of poetic ingenuity, Strang situates classical themes of existentialism, memory, time, and the role of women in two clarifying contexts: the metaphorical mailbox of Proust and the speaker’s own body, as understood in geographical and geological terms.

we need
not gulf
doubt

nor gist-pierce
our place

whatever grip
or drib
we might
or mean

Dear Proust, / You’ve been dawning on me. Gradually, by the charm of all your explanations, our lives have come to be constituted through art. We have made several realities, far beyond the reach of terrible conservative eyes, which grow greater, or are illuminated. Consequence really lives thus, I mean all the time.

“... a miraculous book that is a poetic, political and affective constellation that recalibrates how a poem might work today as a representation of a moment that is both precarious and self-assured, contradictory and confident..” – Jeff Derksen

By Catriona Strang

A founding member of the Institute for Domestic Research, Catriona Strang is the author of Low Fancy, Corked, and Reveries of a Solitary Biker, and co-author with the late Nancy Shaw of Busted, Cold Trip, and Light Sweet Crude. She frequently collaborates with composer Jacqueline Leggatt, and lives with her two grown kids on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ Lands.