Richard Therrien: Sleeping in Tall Grass

"My emptiness will not be

frenetic with the friction

of my father's silences

but still as the unmarked graves

of his many forgotten selves"

- From "Salt"

A cycle of poems, Sleeping in Tall Grass takes an unsparing look at a painful, abusive, yet strangely redemptive family story enfolded within the body of the Canadian prairie itself-at once physical, historical, and metaphysical. These intensely personal poems reflect the complex relationships between sound and space, language and silence. Treating time as more layered than sequential, they reflect a process of organic composition distilled from Therrien's iterative observations and utterances. This is writing that reaches "into the very grain of existence"-a sonorous re-presentation of the human presence on the dispassionate but eternally giving plains.