"When my last book came out in 2012, I was just starting my job as Poet in Residence at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, and was beginning to bring poetry to other unexpected places. I didn't know that this book would be about health, care, mortality, meditation, vulnerability, compassion, loss, subversion, and spontaneity until it began to coalesce. On an airplane, I wrote the essay "Walking the Hospital," the centre of the book, a space that contemplates the activity of walking within an institution while trying to see what's needed and what can be offered in moments of need, when nothing seems enough. What is different about these poems is that they attempt to 'see' and 'feel' what is happening simultaneously." Bloom's command of rhetoric and cadence, her radical emotional honesty, and blunt, deep humour . . . create a fearless poetry. -- Rhea Tregebov About the Author: Ronna Bloom is the author of seven books of poetry. She has led initiatives to bring poetry into health care, developing the Poet in Residence program at Sinai Health. Ronna has collaborated with filmmakers, choreographers, and architects and in 2018, her poem "The City," was painted by PLANT Architects 35 meters wide on King Street in Toronto. Her recent book is A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an Introduction by Phil Hall (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2023). In 2025, In a Riptide will be published by Brick Books. www.ronnabloom.com |