Killarnoe Poems

With its razzle-dazzle wordplay and kaleidoscope of subjects, Sonnet L'Abbe's second collection of poems is a tour-de-force. L'Abbe invents her own unique poetics, coupling a glittering variety of patterns with tumbling rhythms and rhymes. And with this refreshed language, she reconsiders all the rules for twenty-first-century life. The poems work like a whirlwind, ranging from the intimacy of infancy to the shock of whole civilizations razed by war, and are infused with a political undertone that reveals a child's emerging understanding of identity, of specific citizenship, of bodies physical and psychological, of language, imagination, and dream. Whether funny or funky, candid or subtle, amused and ironic or stunned in fright, the poems are guided by a fierce intelligence that never oversimplifies the world. Killarnoe, the poet tells us, "is a place I invented right now. I just built it from my head." And in its reconsideration of what it means to be,Killarnoeis fascinating, charged, and inspired.

SONNET L’ABBÉ won The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize in 1999, and the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for most promising writer under 35, in 2000. Her first collection of poetry was A Strange Relief (M&S, 2001).