Sandra Ridley

A short interview with Sandra Ridley

rob mclennan

Sandra Ridley is the author of three books of poetry: Fallout (Hagios Press), Post-Apothecary (Pedlar Press), and most recently, The Counting House (BookThug). She has taught poetry at Carleton University and has mentored poets through Ottawa’s Salus and Artswell’s “Footprints to Recovery” program for people living with mental illness. Sandra has also facilitated poetry workshops for the City of Ottawa, Ottawa Public Library, and the Tree Reading series. She knows how to use a compass.

Q: Your work tends to favour the extended sequence, often utilizing extended lyric stretches, and avoiding individual, stand-alone poems. What is it about the sequence that appeals? Are all your poems in conversation with one another?

Geomantic riposte: 'The Counting House'

Garry Thomas Morse

Sandra Ridley grew up in Saskatchewan and currently resides in Ottawa, Ontario, where she facilitates poetry workshops at Carleton University, the Tree Reading Series, the Ottawa Public Library, and the City of Ottawa. Her first book of poetry, Fallout, was a finalist for the 2011 Ottawa Book Award and won the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing. Her second book Post-Apothecary was a finalist for the ReLit and Archibald Lampman Awards.

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

Razor feminine

A review of 'Small Siren'

Shamala Gallagher

Photo of Alexandra Mattraw (left) by Adam Thorman.

If Alexandra Mattraw’s first full-length collection Small Siren is a book of the feminine, we have been misunderstanding the feminine all along, misunderstanding its capacity and complexity. This is the feminine as slant of mind, position of articulation, embodied cerebral. In its linguistic inventions and its distinctive grammars, Small Siren rewrites the intimate registers in which mind encounters world.

Stuart Cooke

A poem with commentary from 'Lyre,' 2019

Jerome Rothenberg

Lyre is a collection of poems that attempts to translate more-than-human worlds into different kinds of poetry. As much as my encounter with each animal, plant, and landform produced differences of syntax and vocabulary across the poems, I also wanted to allow the subject to unsettle poetic form itself. In other words, it wasn’t enough just to describe the different worlds or unwelten of these different beings; as nonhuman lives were being translated into human poetry, human poetry also needed to undergo some kind of translation into something else.

author’s note