Alberta's oil boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s shook things up. Money rushed into and out of people's pockets; the church's changing authority was echoed in empty pews; both women and men stumbled off well-worn paths of expectation and desire. In Jacqueline Larson's keen collection, lives lived in rebellion, contradiction, anticipation and impatience interact as the poet traces in particular one young woman's attempts to escape her traditions. With hard-won wisdom which comes from the cycles of departure and return, these are poems that quietly perform some of the disturbances of the female voice; they speak into and from an occupied space.
Set mostly in the Canadian West, the poems revisit campgrounds and rhubarb patches, girls' health films and horseradish. They explore the space between the cultivated and the wild, between ignorance and utterance, between rigid gender roles and self-knowledge. They press against the limitations of the known. They move around and through the confinement of the scripted into a more open space. They travel like Persephone through the underworld in search of a more enticing eros.
