Synopses & Reviews
Working for decades in English and French in poetry, novels, and translations that investigate the relationship between language and female subjectivity, Lola Lemire Tostevin has hewn her own unique and intensely aesthetic path across the national literary landscape, earning her the reputation as one of Canadas leading feminist writers.
Tostevins latest offering of poetry emerges from her deep-seated interest in the creativity of women who face advanced age and its ailments. Through study of exhibitions in galleries and museums, films and dance performances, and voluminous bodies” of text, it became clear to Tostevin that aging not only serves womens creativity but also reinforces it, revealing many forms of strength in vulnerability.
Singed Wings invites the reader to peer into the interior world of Camille Claudel, whose intimate understanding of her subjects, from young girl to old woman, captured quite a different power than that of her lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. Although Claudel was not able to fully realize her creative process into old age, many others did, including Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Betty Goodwin, Pina Bausch, and Agnès Varda, and it is in direct response to the vital creativity of these women that the poet finds the inspiration and determination to move her own art forward.
Spurred on by these groundbreaking precedents that displace the narcissistic, shopworn” notion of the ideal woman described only in terms of desired female form, Tostevin allocates space where a writer facing her own aging process can use the experience to give it new shapes in language, positing that reimagining the various creative forms of women into language is a postmodern undertaking in an artistic milieu where postmodernism may turn out to have as many heads as the mythical Hydra.
Synopsis
Spare, intimate poems situated at the threshold of the semiotic and the symbolic, the genotext and the phenotext.
Synopsis
Singed Wings peers into the interior world of Camille Claudel (Auguste Rodin's lover) whose intimate understanding of her subjects, from young girl to old woman, captured quite a different power. Lola Lemire Tostevin allocates a place in which a writer facing her own aging process can take the experience to the limits by giving it new shapes in language.
Lola Lemire Tostevin is one of Canada's leading feminist writers and a prominent figure in Canadian literary analysis, as well as the author of many books of poetry, including The Other Sister (2008), Site-Specific Poems (2004), and The Jasmine Man (2002).
About the Author
Lola Lemire Tostevin is a bilingual Canadian writer who works mainly in English. She is the author of three novels, eight collections of poetry, numerous pieces of short fiction, and a collection of literary essays and criticism. She has translated into English the work of many writers, including Anne Hébert, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, Nicole Brossard, and Paule Thévenin, and she has translated into French Michael Ondaatjes
Elimination Dance. Her novel
Frog Moon was translated into French and two of her collections of poetry,
Color of Her Speech and
sophie, were translated into Italian. Her most recent novel,
The Other Sister, was published in the fall of 2008.
Tostevin has taught creative writing at York University, Toronto, and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, London. She is presently preparing a second collection of literary essays and is working on a series of short fictions.