Poetry - General & Miscellaneous, Canadian Poetry

Liar: A Poem

Name: Liar: A Poem
Author: Lynn Crosbie
ISBN: 9781770890763

by Lynn Crosbie

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Overview

A book-length narrative poem, this sassy, confessional, intoxicating, and heartbreaking work charts the ups and downs of a torrid love affair. From illusions of permanence and ownership to the pain of estrangement, Liar masterfully explores feelings familiar to anyone who has ever loved — and lost. Crosbie also goes beyond this territory, examining the lover’s own complicity in her joy and suffering. Liar is a grotesque, beautiful meditation on the nature of love.

Synopsis

At once casting aside and reinventing the confessional mode, Liar is a booklength monument to love found, betrayed, renounced, and ultimately accepted as transformative. The white-hot immediacy of detail and scorching emotional honesty of Liar make for a compelling tour through one lover's accounting for her own actions and those of her beloved. From the delusion of ownership to the pain of estrangement, Crosbie's surgical intelligence exposes what romantics so often refuse to acknowledge: the lover's own complicity in her joy and suffering. Swinging between the grotesque and the beautiful, Crosbie's depiction of the lover adrift alters how we think of the love poem -- indeed, how we think of passion itself.

About the Author, Lynn Crosbie

Montreal-born Lynn Crosbie is a cultural critic, the author of four books of poetry: Miss Pamela's Mercy, VillainElle, Pearl, and a collection of new and selected work, Queen Rat. Her recent collection of poems, Pearl, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She is also the author of the controversial book, Paul's Case and the editor of The Girl Wants To and Click. She lives in Toronto, and has a PhD in English literature (on the work of Anne Sexton). Crosbie teaches at the Ontario College of Art and the University of Toronto.