Hard Feelings

Hard Feelings holds the instant up, halts it mid-air, exposes an astounding world: fake cicada cries blare from loudspeakers; a rack of meat hangs from a bicycle basket; Nixon sidles off with the cake; diving horses of Atlantic City plunge. The neon rope of loneliness tightens. Like holding a glass up to the light to find it muddy with marks, Hard Feelings reveals, as Francine Prose writes, “little climaxes of disquiet.” Here, our strange, genuine and unexpected human impulses are revealed. These poems offer a hopefulness and a gratitude for our ordinary, everyday lives.

Originally from Grimsby, Ontario, Sheryda Warrener has lived in Japan and Sweden, and now calls Vancouver home. Her work has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s 2009 Long Poem Contest and ARC Magazine’s Poem of the Year competition, and she recently received second prize in Prism International’s 2011 Poetry Contest. Hard Feelings is her first book.

“Warrener combines crisp description with lyrical tone.” — Montreal Review of Books

“What makes these poems, these little narratives, these anti-stories, is their stagger, their stammer and just how damned tight they are, even in their perceived looseness.” —rob mclennan