Echoic Mimic is a mixed-genre long poem whose narrative thread follows the tumultuous life of a girl named Ada through a complicated love-hate relationship with her small hometown and its inhabitants, as she leaves to land wide-eyed in a new big city. Cut loose from the comfort and insular world of art school, she tries to figure out who she’s become and what to do next. Along the way, she must confront her personal myths by standing up to a confrontational character from her past, who continually inserts herself into Ada’s narrative at all the wrong times. A modern epic in four acts, Echoic Mimic uses playful and clever language to explore the creation of a personal mythology, the disjuncture between self-concept and the outer world, exit strategies adopted for self-preservation, and the things we do to alleviate inner emptiness.
Lesley Trites’s poetry has been published in Matrix, filling Station, and Queen Street Quarterly. When not writing poetry, travelling the globe, or swirling a vintage Cabernet, she is a technical writer by day and a wine blogger by night.
“Imaginative and playful in form.” — Montreal Review of Books