We don't choose the stories we inherit, but we can stitch new futures from the threads of our past .
Selvage is a work of salvaging and selving, of salvaging a self from disparate elements. Fragments from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the language of trees talking to one another through mycelial networks, familial stories, and ruminations on the cusp of motherhood are literally and lyrically torn apart, spun, and sewn together to create a collage of what it means to be human, which is to say, what it means to be incomplete and fragmented. Mashing up the traditional lyric with innovative form and visual poetry, this experimental work is deeply personal, but it also attempts to gesture towards the human experience by showing the unfinished seams of our existence: the messy ends, beautiful twists, and unexpected new beginnings sewn together with intertwined threads of intergenerational trauma and love.
- Experimental blending of visual poetry and traditional verse.
- Visual / experimental poetry by a woman in a field dominated by men.
- Timely discussions of personhood, belonging, human rights, ancestry, our relationship with / working with the land.
- By interrogating and plundering the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, this work forms a feminist interrogation of patriarchal, colonial, and legal scripts of being and personhood.
- A poetic wrestling with foundational nation-state documents in North America, similar to Tracy K. Smith’s poem “Declaration” (Wade in the Water, Graywolf) and the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
- Siklosi asks what humans can stand to learn from listening to the trees talk to one another, from tapping into the languages under our feet and above our heads. Readers are certainly interested in this topic in both fiction and nonfiction, as evidenced by the massive success of books ranging from Finding the Mother Tree and The Hidden Life of Trees to The Overstory and Greenwood.
- Exploration of the rich history of women's handicraft as a feminist poetic praxis.
- Ecocritical and feminist in tone, and with a healthy dollop of social justice, Selvage would appeal to anyone interested in poetry that blurs boundaries across different genres and formats, those who enjoy some politics with their poetry, as well as those who enjoy poems about nature and our precarious place within it.
