Longlisted for the 2004 ReLit AwardsSlovenly Love is Meira Cook's third book of poetry. A Fine Grammar of Bones and Toward a Catalogue of Falling, both collections of lyrics, are now joined by a fascinating long poem composed of five sequences. "e;A Year of Birds"e; sensuously explores erosion of self in the gain of new life in motherhood; "e;Blue Lines"e; concerns a woman and her double, the imperishable self she "e;left"e; to become the self she is; "e;Trawling: a biography of the river"e; introduces Heraclitus into the Winnipeg Flood of 1997, the Red River becoming a river of the mind; "e;Kiss by the Hotel de Ville,"e; an extended meditation on varieties of dislocation between art and reality, focuses on Robert Doisneau's famous photograph of the same title; "e;Tempestuous"e; is a passionate, Miranda-centred reading of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Each sequence is distinct, but together they explore a life of gap, fragment, flux. "e;Ah swift-winged youth,"e; says a voice in "e;Trawling,"e; "e;the world is, was, and ever will be full of wonder."e; Slovenly Love, in its exhilarating renovation of words and forms, gorgeously confirms that.

Longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards Slovenly Love is Meira Cook's third book of poetry. A Fine Grammar of Bones and Toward a Catalogue of Falling, both collections of lyrics, are now joined by a fascinating long poem composed of five sequences. Slovenly Love, in its exhilarating renovation of words and forms, gorgeously confirms that.