Take a Deep Breath

Wednesday April 25, 2012
7:00pm - 8:30pm
Audrey's Books
10702 Jasper Avenue
Edmonton, AB
Free

Four women share brand-new books that tackle survival and its compensations in very different poetic ways. Sally Ito’s lyrics tackle the world where a child’s pull-toy is a soul on a string. Naomi MacIlwraith moves between two languages: nêhiyawêwin, the Plains Cree language, and English, âkayâsîmowin. Barbara Langhorst revisits a violent personal tragedy through startling imagery that rends even as it heals. And Heather Simeney MacLeod will share poems excavating popular culture, memory, and relationship. -- Edmonton Poetry Festival online schedule

Born in Taber, Alberta, Sally Ito is a writer, editor, and translator living in Winnipeg with her husband and two children. Currently, she is an instructor of Creative Writing and a blog contributor to a children’s multicultural literature blog, PaperTigers. To express a deep abiding love for things ‘visible and invisible’ is what she aspires to in writing her poetry; failing and yet ever striving is the process through which she hopes one day to arrive.

Making awareness into language is the act that binds the elements of Sally Ito’s newest collection of poetry, Alert to Glory. Whether the focus is on parenting, biblical texts, or on creativity itself, Ito discerns the moment in which the word might become wondrous—moments when the mind-bell is struck dumb, and the hollow fills with shuddering sound, agog with itself.  Ito’s images ring with profundity in clear, fearless language that seeks to connect the reader with the soul’s capacity to sense the divine through gifts of awareness and wonder.