The Work of Days is a collection of poems that are as captivating and confusing as emotions, dreams or hallucinations. Many of these poems are written in the first person to a “you,” albeit sometimes it seems the narrator doesn’t realize she is addressing anyone when she does so.
There are some poems that reference no one but plants, insects and the weather. Some are collections of conditions or conjunctions while others are collections of actions without subjects. Some are even collections of dedications without either subjects or objects.
Each poem seems to hang together with the others in a delicate web, circling and tangled around one another like our memories, conversations and feelings often do in our minds: They cannot be separated from one another and yet they are. Each poem informs and complicates the others with common rhythms and threads of love, sex, bodies, dreams/hallucinations/confusion, plants, weather, plastics, medications, threats and time. These poems are beautiful, fragile and haunting, both joyous and sad for the necessary work of living, sharing and feeling anything and everything. (Nancy Duncan)
by Sarah Lang, $16.95, 79 pgs, Coach House Books, 401 Huron Street on bpNichol Lane, Toronto, ON, M5S 2G5, chbooks.com