Reading Reading the Bible Backwards Backwards

There were a lot of surreal things about the Robert Priest reading at the Dora Keogh last night. Not the least of which, the pub did not stock Bombay Sapphire.

I had to settle for Tanqueray. Women of a certain age can be rather fussy about their gin, darling, though I admit it’s unlikely I’d do well in a blind taste test. Still, there’s a great deal  to be said for blue.

On the other hand, there’s much to be said for those occasions where none of it is your agenda, and you get to try new things and meet new people. How did I end up going to a book launch for poet Robert Priest? Why from Facebook, of course.

This invite sold me in two seconds flat. I tend to get rather excited about flippant Catholic imagery, being a child of the Madonna generation. The cover of his book, Reading the Bible Backwards, featured the Madonna herself as the centre of a vinyl record. I mean, how cool was that?

Robert Priest, not to be confused with Judas Priest, is also known as Dr. Poetry. He writes poems for children, adults, and those who aren’t so sure. His numerous children’s books are beloved by CBC, Today’s Parent Magazine, and kiddies from sea to shining sea. But the good doctor is also playwright and novelist and journalist and songwriter. He also has big hair, always has, according to a quick scan on Google. He wrote a hit song for Alanis Morissette, and snippets for the Farmer’s Almanac. He writes for Now Magazine, Toronto’s progressive weekly, and consistently wins cool awards.  But best of all, in my mind, he says fascinating things about writing: “As a Priest, it is also my job to let the light in, to be a reflector, to open up curtains.”

Now, Priest is the kind of clever wordsmith I envy, the kind who never runs out of great titles like A Terrible Case of the Stars and Reading the Bible Backwards. Like the titles, there is an edge of razor wit and a tinge of droll morbidity throughout the poet’s wordscapes. Robert read a handful to a roomful of admirers, including a poem about that topic most neglected in poetry: the humble anus. Like I said, there were a few surreal things, and that was one of them, considering it was an excellent poem.

Now ECW Press editor Michael Holmes was certainly not shy in expressing how he felt about Robert’s new book. “Wonderful, powerful, funny,” he told us. “It’s my favourite book of Canadian poetry that I’ve read in years.”

I read the book cover-to-cover- back cover to front cover, that is- in honour of the title theme. (Another wonderful touch to the underlying Suessianism of an over-35 event: in devotion to the poet, one fellow wore his tie and sweater vest backwards.) We started with a cheerful love poem, and laughed our way through the mundane and hilarious emblems of this world. Sometimes I felt the spirit of e.e. cummings and even George Carlin, who was remembered in the book’s acknowledgements.

Along the way, I memed and spliced. Words danced. I encountered chicken physics, the trickster’s trickstress, and Frequently Unasked Questions. I looked up metazoan in the dictionary, and plowed right on through until I had read Reading the Bible Backwards back to front.

And all this is how it came to me, a small but curious discovery:

The Bible is not a palindrome, and if we all read Revelations first, we’d then know how insane it is to take it too literally. Which would mean that along the way, its poetry would not get lost in wars of literalism the way it has always gotten lost throughout its bloody history.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Katia Grubisic’s What if Red Ran Out

How beautiful our children would have been, though poor at pool, Katia Grubisic laments. Just why this catches me so, I cannot say, but her book of What if Red Ran Out is filled with such what ifs and were nevers. Forget about hopes of grandiosity or words tangled up to make themselves unreadable to all but the chosen few academes who must translate them for us: Katia’s world is here on earth, here with strawberry jam and moths and “cardboard eclipse thingies.”

Katia’s work has appeared in all the mandatory Canadian literati publications like Grain and The Fiddlehead and Taddle Creek. But all of this is just a disguise. Sure, she can wrestle the big themes with the best of them, or slip images into your mind that will never leave it. She can use words like ‘concupiscence’ and ‘montivagant’ and ‘convivial,’ and drop names like Seamus and Camus like she means it.

But, Katia assures us, not to worry about all of that. “Don’t worry, this is a poem/entirely without grace,” she writes. Words are important to her, but the real concerns are more along the lines of “what if red ran out?” and about the laundry. Life, however tragic or rare, is also silly. In the world Katia sees, “Eros and Thanatos have gone to the mall.” If red does not run out, she will ‘exist on raspberries” like “others who have successfully lost their minds.”

All this suggests that what’s ahead for Katia’s writing will be witty, realistic vignettes, with sweeping metaphors and astute observations, rendered with cleverness and distinction. For now, there’s still that sense of a poet trying too hard, pushing words together to make a cellist appear under a tree, for example, without any real reason why she should be there. Poetry would do well to avoid more volumes in the archives with phrases like “missing the filigreed metacarpals’ infinite division.” You can feel the earth, though, if you toss away this heavy-handed surrealism. You can feel the pulse of a very funny, very unusual, very vivid woman, and you want to get rid of those unnecessary layers, to see her naked.

What if red ran out
Katia Grubisic
Goose Lane Editions, New Brunswick, 2008.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Buy Katia’s book or mine, or help out my blog by buying any books through this link:
chapters.indigo.ca

In Which the Author Discovers Erin Knight’s The Sweet Fuels

I could spend blissful years stirring academic poetic discourse around a classroom, exchanging highlighted notes and chewing on turns of phrase, but I must keep a promise I once made. I vowed to never frighten a person away from poetry, which has few enough readers, and to let more readers discover its joy. And how could I possibly do so besides sharing my own work with ‘the people?’ Well, I refuse to get caught up in the delicious word-twisting discussions of poetry that render it squashed and meaningless to anyone born after 1857, in the end.

You know what I’m talking about. Pick up an expensive art magazine, for example. You’ll hear it in the way the writers talk about a giant painting of bubbles. “The lines of the painting vivisect at terminal vertical intervals suggesting the death and excavation of history’s muse. To grasp the brushstroke with this painterly torture in mind, one must submerge all faculties in the absence of the artist’s intention.” Then they cheerfully tell you the painting, which to you seems to be a joyous and colourful celebration of gardens or something or other spring, is about the holocaust or Central American hostage holding and it costs four point seven million dollars.

And while I wholeheartedly believe we would all do well to do a few literary gymnastics, to read some old poetry and a few classics, to brush up on what’s currently on the prize lists or new in Canadian verse, it’s best that we recover honest expressions of our impressions. Remember when Kramer embarrasses the whole group by telling the girl with the Cyrano nose that she’s as pretty as any New Yorker? She ‘just needs a nose job,’ he tells her plainly. In the end, who gets the girl?

The tightly knit academic circles will forever bustle in their wordy, toothy circles. Like a bunch of heart surgeons discussing various valve suturing techniques, they will never lend a hand to the lay public to give their passion a wider audience. I vowed to be more like Kramer, to read a book as a smart and lively girl, tell it if it needs a nose job, and praise the beauty it already possesses.

Now, any number of literature professors or old-school editors would ask what the decidedly un-poetic New York television show Seinfeld has to do with Canadian poet Erin Knight’s debut, The Sweet Fuels.

Nothing, if poetry is only a Donne and Milton and Coleridge and never about the sweet plums in the icebox or Bob Dylan or about how even the rain has such small hands.

If you listen carefully to Kramer’s script, he’s a poet in every episode. Like William Carlos Williams, the K-Man waxes especially poetic about fruits. There’s the cantaloupe, there’s the avocado, and there’s the Mackinaw peaches, only available for two weeks of the year.

“The Mackinaw peaches, Jerry… I waited all year for this. Oooh, this is fantastic. Makes your taste buds come alive. It’s like having a circus in your mouth…Jerry, this is a miracle of nature that exists for a brief period. It’s like the Aurora Borealis.”

Don’t always run away from poetry because you don’t know ‘how to read poetry’ or ‘don’t get it.’ Just pick up the peach and savour it.

In Diamond, Knight writes: “Why write only if? Why not write if sunlight/strikes the dust motes in the room, if a splinter/wedges beneath your nail, if you fall/in love, if you fall? Write the nub of graphite/in your palm, pure carbon, memory/of a long-ago word- so many of us have it/lodged beneath the skin…”

Listen:

“Take the small maps on your knees. Grasses
traced routes there as you took back your wind,
while backstory spin in the bicycle tires.
When you stand, can you still read the legend
creased in the skin, is this your quietest scar?”

Listen:

“There’s a gnosis in the undersides of leaves,
silver edges turned up before a storm.”

I have no doubt that Knight’s work will stand up to the scrutiny of the higher hallways. Imagery, metaphor, “continuous engagement with our points of reference.” Check, check, check. But more importantly, this is the kind of book that talks about making tea, about making bread, about leaving the prairies, about searching maps for clues of our past. It is the kind of book that can earn the trust of the pedestrian audience, let us giggle, let us cry, move our ordinary experiences into the divinity of that diamond dust mote.

It can keep a person going through the endless and trivial travails. It is delicious, tender, redolent, and fleeting- like those fabled Mackinaw peaches, sweet fuel.

The Sweet Fuels, by Erin Knight.Goose Lane Editions, 2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, a Handymaiden Edition, 2006. Look for it on Indigo or Amazon. Her poetry has also been published widely in journals like Spillway, Rattle, Modern Poetry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Quarry, White Wall Review, and more.

Please help me by purchasing the books I talk about, my book, or any other books at chapters.indigo.ca

Sheri Benning’s Thin Moon Psalm

“The trick of May is to believe with empty hands,” Sheri Benning writes in Thin Moon Psalm. It is these perfectly pure phrases that make her prairie psalm a special gift. This poetry volume is that rare moment of silence in a bustling world, taking us back to the enchantment of the open sky, the moon, the things of magic and wonder that could once soothe even the most broken of hearts or skinned of elbows. “…always, after we fail at faith, small-fires of crocus or bluebell snag the eye.”

Thin Moon Psalm is Benning’s second book, following up Earth After Rain. The manuscript won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. Her first book won two awards, also, and she won the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Award for achievement in the arts.

That may all validate the $18 you should spend on this book, but the real reason? these small snags of bluebell:

“You make tea for a man who was your lover./Where once there was desire, now a  palm-sized heartbeat,/ pleasant to hold.”

“Night moved across you like a glacier and you woke here, bone-broken, far from where you thought you would be. If you could tie a string to your what-ifs, this is what you would weave- a hydra-nest of jackpine.”

“Listening has made your heart a bruise, a dark pearl of gravity.”

In each selection, the thin moon illuminates outlines, suggests the meanings, leaves secrets dancing in shadows. These thoughts, unsent letters, dreams, private despairs, give depth to shared experiences that we may gloss over as ordinary. Love and loss will always be the dominating themes of literature, from mythology to the Bible to Canadian poets. They are the deepest, darkest and most beautiful themes in the human experience.

Thin Moon Psalm
Sheri Benning,
Brick Books, London
2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Her poetry book is available through her site, or through indigo.ca.

Nadine McInnis’s Two Hemispheres

There’s nothing more fascinating than madness. Once, I wondered how a mind could come unhinged: now, with a bit of firsthand experience and a few decades’ observations, I know everybody’s crazy.

Nadine McInnis shares this fascination, and reveals her own melancholic illness in Two Hemispheres, an exquisite collection of poems from Brick Books.

That artists write poetry about their depression is nothing new: the hurt heart is all of literature. But the elegant and insightful way the poet weaves her own experience of despair into deeply intuitive conjecture of others’ madness is nothing short of brilliant.

Irrevocably moved by mid-1800s portraits of madwomen of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, but left with meagre or nonexistent accounts of their cases, McInnis delves into the recesses of her own imagination to respond to the photographs. Reprinted here, the sepia images and accompanying imagination of their conditions resurrect from erasure these asylum ghosts.

The poet eloquently fuses her journey with the forgotten ones, showing the mind’s depth and vigor as equal to its fragility. The dusty halls of history come alive: be transported from the threshold of your own insanity into another era, one where lunatics wander asylum gardens. Recognize your own circle within these madhouse walls- one woman fancies herself royalty, with blood “cool/ and untroubled and blue, blue as heaven.” Another is terrified of damnation; one refuses to eat; another thinks they’re trying to poison her. These patients, “rescued from indigence,” mirror something of my day-to-day life, despite the Victorian dresses.

There’s nothing clear in our still-relevant muddle to understand the human mind and its connection to reality, whatever that is. Ages of pharmacology, of religious charity, of the sex-obsessed dream analysis of cocaine-addled Dr. Freud; the shamanistic mythologies of primeval and remote peoples, the terrifying devices and restraints, the hazy restful dreams of convalescence or abusive therapists, the deciphering of the voices of angels, the casting out of demons; the equally persuasive evidences that addiction is organic and spiritual in nature- and still we have nothing but a few helpless maps of dendrites and synapses, as if this could help us connect the dots between the two hemispheres of the brain.

Miasma, mania, catalepsy, electrodes- McInnis peers for us through the disconcerting lens of mental illness’s language, and languishes there, finding a place for herself and her Victorian lunatic friends that does not cover nor cower. We glimpse revelations of her own struggle through darkness, and into dawn.

Way back when the Titanic stormed back into popularity, the supremely saccharine qualities of the film were redeemed when Rose muttered dramatically this truth: “a woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.”
Perhaps mysteries are not always meant to be solved- but instead to be revealed in small increments worthy of contemplation. These crazy ladies seem to revel in their brief moment of sepia stardom: their eyes, at turns hopeless, at turns defiant, at turns feisty or ribald, challenge the absence of factual case histories or dry statistics. Something of their deep ocean is revealed here. McInnis’s uncanny ability to disappear and let these other voices through is, ironically, what makes her own stories more compelling. Whether the secrets imagined are true or not is irrelevant- Salmond Rushdie recently said that what sets humans apart from other animals is our curious habit of telling stories to make meaning out of our lives.

Crazy people make stuff up, but isn’t mythology all about the universality of mystery? “True or false” may have no more merit than those ubiquitous but inanimate statistics we sadly live by. Thankfully, McInnis masterfully shows us that the meaning of life just might be the flickering dark/light interior of our imagination. That very same place inside may be the source of our disconnection and our illness, but it is also the source of our healing and recovery.

Two Hemispheres
Nadine McInnis
Brick Books, 2007

If you would like Lorette C. Luzajic to write for your publication, or would simply like more great stuff to read, visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The Secret in the Old Attic: Anne Szumigalski’s Ghost

When Earth Leaps Up
Anne Szumigalski
Brick Books, 2006

Browsing through When Earth Leaps Up feels like one of those afternoons spent rifling through mementoes in a dusty attic, sun streaming through cracked windows. But it’s not my attic and I feel like I’m ferreting someone else’s secrets, prying open private papers. They are so compelling that I’m unable to put these mesmerizing discoveries down even as I hear footprints coming up the old stairs.

Alas, it’s just Anne Szumigalski’s ghost creeping into the shadows as I snoop through her things. She may be a little restless about When Earth Leaps Up- the posthumous volume is something of a scrapbook put together from loose papers and thoughts left behind in her personal effects. She did not order them, select them, polish them or finish them, and indeed they have an uncensored, unfinished, private feel. Without the poet’s hands-on control, I suspect I’m eavesdropping on revelations and sentiments unintended for me, and this makes this volume extraordinary.

Mark Abley, a dear friend of the poet, and a Canadian literary staple, is responsible for compiling from her files and notebooks what fills When Earth Leaps Up. He confesses to his “trepidation” at some selections in the afterword, wondering whether he’s giving up the equivalent of a journal to the public, or if he is allowing beloved scribbles to be immortalized. He acknowledges the trickiness of the whole process, not just out of privacy concerns, but also whether the poet would have felt a piece was ready, or intended at all for the public. After all, not every note a person makes is destined for completion- we scribble random ideas and poetic thoughts that later hit the paper shredder.

“I need to come clean, and state that the book you are holding is not the book that Anne would have sent out for publication, had she lived another year or two,” Abley admits. “Apart from correcting a few obvious typos, I did not alter any of her words or play with her line breaks.” Most of the pieces weren’t first drafts, he says, but then, they weren’t edited either, and Anne liked to revise her work until it felt perfect.

The resulting collection feels like a bundle of letters with a ribbon slipping out of place. It couldn’t be any more beautiful- perhaps poets need a trusted friend to keep them from overworking or hiding, another poet to coax delicate secrets from the shadows. It’s not that Anne would ever shrink from self-revelation- she rather basked in the nakedness of poetry. It’s just that here the nakedness feels more chanced, less planned. The work is as stunning, exquisite, gorgeous as always, maybe more so. The usual themes of death and change and human longing are all present, and still infused with a ribald, humourous undertone.

The title poem opens:

when earth leaps up
and heaven descends
and the two meet like lovers
then the question is
could these flowers be stars

and is dust nothing
more than the handful
I sprinkled on your face
as you went down into the dirt
(47)

Graves and skulls and bones and the anthropologies of the human condition have long been staples of Anne’s work- what greater themes could poets ponder than love or death? An early memory of my childhood centres around one of Anne’s stunning, eerie passions. I was perhaps far too young to be voraciously reading through each Canadian poet on those musty beanbag chairs at the little library, but precociously I already identified myself as a poet and knew instinctively that to write poetry, I must read it. And I came upon Sitting Under Death’s Rich Shade, where Anne ponders the skeletal remains of a man she called Frans. I couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and knew nothing of either love or death. But when Anne wrote, “ a bit/ of me is broken/because of your memory” I knew with spooky certainty that one day it would be clear. Anne closed her poem with “damn you, I cry out/you would not take me/when I was fifteen and dangerous.” (from On Glassy Wings, 117)

How I wanted to be fifteen and dangerous: to love so freely and lose so tragically. What Anne’s poems have always shown is how time waits for no one, and now it’s poignant and painful, almost a personal loss, to shuffle through Anne’s private papers as her spectre roams, eager to divulge but censored by the gods from what the living cannot know. It seems a terrible irony that the same ‘fifteen and dangerous’ for which I waited so impatiently has come and gone two decades plus ago, as have a sadly lengthy line-up of my own Frans-ian tragedies.

Still, as somber as death may be, there is buoyancy in these poems that transcends the morbid subject matter. Perhaps Anne glimpsed prophetically a comfort that she reveals from before she went beyond: penning her thoughts, which included the admission that “for the living/ there is nothing worse than death”, she writes: “When I think of him I say/’He is lost to me.’/I should say perhaps/’He is found to himself.’”(Untitled, 48)

The poems here are so stirring because Anne is no longer metaphorically Sitting Under Death’s Rich Shade, but actually buried in it. The ghostly feeling is nothing more than the fulfillment of Anne’s poetry. For all her life, she wrote carefully the questions that haunt the human heart, poetic longings for the dead, for those left here, for what we may encounter after. Now that she has slid into forever, she would have to revise this and every other volume with the answers she has found. But the human plight remains that we must wait out our own curiosities and see for ourselves this mystery. No one states this more beautifully than Anne herself in To a Friend Dying:

“this is only the beginning
of change” I shall say
as I bury your pupa
into its mound of dirt

“on the day of wings
something shall certainly emerge
perhaps not flesh
perhaps not what you expect.”
(54)

Visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at her web site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
Her poetry collection The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos is available on her site, or through Indigo or Amazon online. You should order it: it’s a damn good read!
xo Lorette

Two Naughty Hotties Sipping Wine in the Bathtub while Reading Philip Larkin

Imagine a six-foot blonde with power curves – the most buoyant breasts ever made- curled up on a small couch, pulling a thin white lacy sweater against herself. She stares up at you through smart and sleepy baby blues and purrs out: “You know, I just love Philip Larkin.”

She says it casually, but there’s an appetite there, not hunger, really, perhaps desire. I’m mesmerized, I lower my eyes and my cheeks are flushing. I’ve never heard of Larkin. No, not true. Heard of, probably. I can’t think at all right now. Whatever: it’s not too familiar. I’m hearing it now, and when Maevey mews like this, musing, you do what she tells you. You want it too, whatever it is.

“There is not one word out of place. He uses exactly the right words, and you need each one of them wholly,” Maeve is saying. “There are only enough, no more.”

The room is fuzzy, like a pale pink sweater enveloping me. The chaos of strewn clothing, dog- scattered debris, boxes packed and unpacked, and books all fades into a dizzy glow. The candles flicker. Maeve begins to read aloud.

“This was your place of birth, this daytime palace,
This miracle of glass, whose every hall
The light as music fills, and on your face
Shines petal-soft; sunbeams are prodigal…”

The first time I saw her, she was answering the door at my neighbour Crazy Paul’s house. How I was protective of him, asked her to explain herself. And so was she: who was I? Then we giggled, immediately recognizing maternal, sister things. Crazy Paul is another story. Suffice it to say just for some imagery that he fancied suit jackets cluttered with rhinestones and vintage doodads, cowboy boots and things of gold or burgundy tassel-ry.

Another time: with the insistently bright summer sky blazing blue behind her at my husband’s funeral. We all had huge sunglasses on. Tears on every girl’s face under those shiny glasses. Zoë. Maeve. Crazy Paul! So many widows.

“And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars…”

There are times when Maevey seems unsettlingly like Anna Nicole Smith. The generous buxomry, the warm yet bossy grip, the reckless parts of her, the breathy muchness. But she evades flakiness and that deadly brand of ditziness, in favour of dizzying study and work and play. She’s got the sugar of Marilyn Monroe, but is not nearly so tragic and could never have been her. Still, her lovers would say she exudes something of that beauty, there’s a way about her, and her smile is deep and generous. She is demanding, but loyal, blonde but dark, paler than white yet still a woman of blues.

For her birthday, I bought her a gorgeous tiara. (I must borrow it for my book launch!) My heavenly and infuriating Maevey. Infuriating because once I took her for the finest Indian cuisine in Toronto and she demanded to know why there were bones in the chicken. Heavenly because we share a few secrets that I’m sure someone somewhere would pay a lot of money for if we were even remotely famous! Heavenly because her favourite poem by me is “with all due respect Mr. Thompson”. This year, a Valentine, in the mail, how old fashioned and precious, because a friend is a forever Valentine.

“Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace…”

Once upon a time I called Maeve on a Friday night and asked what she was doing. She said, “I’m soaking in a steamy tub sending dirty text messages.” Maeve always asks how I’m doing. On that particular night, I was as fabulous as she was. I had just devoured a generous dish of grilled octopus in lemon and wine, and was sipping peach tea and reading. Reading in the bathtub! Oh, with wine, there is always wine. Oh, the oblivion you can fall into, this Larkin-tinged hypnotism. The oblivion of the beautiful, stunning, astonishing momentary lapses of reason. The flit of meaningful meaninglessnesses that alight and fade without our intervention. The poet, too, writes only of the extraordinary within ordinary things.

I pour the wine, I’m guzzling, Maevey’s sipping. Always the lady, which seems hilarious to those who know her. The lulling rhythms of Larkin’s enjambment and rhyme roll like marbles through the caress of her voice. Fittingly, some jazz flits lightheartedly in the background- Larkin wrote about jazz, as well as his poetry about death. Though he occasionally sounds Yeats-y, he swears liberally and has a caustic and bitter side. Maeve brings him alive, and I’m stunned at how many she has memorized, at this committed passion she carries. Writer Maevey. How she can study risk management and know insurance law inside out, memorize sonnets, and wear Hello Kitty pajamas when curling up with her enormous canine child. Maeve and I wouldn’t agree on any of the same TV shows or clothes or heroes or menus or cocktails or boys, not in a million years, and we don’t give a damn.

“The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough
To have the blind persistence
To upset an existence…”

When I stumble into the snowy night outside, the cold is bracing, alive. I weave merrily along until a taxi comes by. Maevey and I like our late night taxis, that’s for sure. We might not see one another without them! Like I’m 18 again, I’ve got half a bottle of cheap rose sloshing around in my giant it-bag, and I’m clutching The Collected Works of Philip Larkin in my hand. When I steal inside, it’s after two in the morning, but I pour a huge glass of vino and pretend I could still smoke cigarettes, and I read without ceasing.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
You can order her book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, at her site, or through Indigo or Amazon online. Take a chance: you’ll love it! It’s one of Maevey’s favourite books!