(alive): Selected and new poems showcases twenty years of Rhea Tregebov’s poetry, along with several new poems. This volume charts the course of a poetic career which has seen Tregebov consistently praised for her elegant writing and strong poetic voice.
Taking It In
I call to ask you about property taxes
and you tell me about the light,
the way it comes in through the window
and moves over the floor, over
the kitchen table, how it lays hands
on everything. and I listen, and see
you at the kitchen table in Winnipeg,
the crisp blue sky a rectangle
in the window. Oh love.
That gives me a window
like this, a father, light.
I think you are going
like oak, like brandy, like
dark wine. The good stuff
you’re made of taking the light in.
praise
“The collection is marked by compassion, as again and again the poems insist on connections between self and others.” —Alison Calder, Winnipeg Free Press
“For decades Rhea Tregebov has been writing poems of penetrating honesty. At their core is a deep familiarity with the necessities of love; inconsolable loss, inconsolable hope. What strength and what tenderness there is in her embrace of these necessities. The clarity of her voice is deeply moving, a voice at home in its skin, entirely aware, deeply compassionate.” —Anne Michaels
“In poems of deceptive brevity, ‘this hard and rocky place’ that is the world turns out to be the source of a lucid beauty. I am tempted to say that this exemplary collection is the essential Rhea Tregebov. It has the intellectual honesty, the curiosity, the willingness, the risk.” —Roo Borson
