Not in Vain You've Sent Me Light [Paperback]

Not in Vain Youve Sent Me Lightbegins with a provocative, sometimes humorous expos? of two lovers and their collisions and triumphs, and evolves into a high-voltage portrait gallery, depicting heroes and artists, scientists and politicians, mothers and their conflicted daughters. Cora Sir? draws on a multi-dimensional palette to deepen her exploration of identity, displacement and the cosmic powers of love and art.

Cora Sir? lives in Montr?al where she writes fiction, essays and poetry. She is the author of two novels,Behold Things Beautiful(Signature Editions, 2016),The Other Oscar(Quattro Books, 2016) andSigns of Subversive Innocents(Signature Editions, 2014), a collection of poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for various literary prizes. Born in Canada, she often writes of elsewheres, drawing on her encounters in faraway places as well as her familys history of displacement.

He loathes French's / won't touch the stuff. / Where he grew up / the mustard isn't neon bright / but rusty as the cordillera / zingy on your lips -- / a bee sting at first taste.

Sir? uses memory as a bridge to realization, and subtle humour as a path to truth rather than a way to allude it. Her words dig into the depths of peoples identities  ourselves, lovers, family and friends, strangers  to discover how much we can only guess at or what we might never know even over the course of a lifetime.

Light can be a sunflower. And light can be yellow mustard. Its in the bruises the charcoal smudge of shadows & a whirl of prismic colours, Cora Sir? writes, as she uncovers moments of intimacy and connection, colour and joy, beauty and light in the private, political, and historically fraught wounds of life. The perceptive speaker in these poems stretches herself towards a sense of global inclusion in the local, searching for belonging by existing in rather than travelling through physical and psychic geographies of poetry.

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