Vallum concrete top crack#

In “X-Ray Clinic,” the speaker notices the increasingly surreal details of a medical checkup. In “Scott,” the speaker wryly observes the body of a man who shows romantic interest in them. HM: A lot of your work is observational and you have a great skill in making the mundane hyper-real. There’s sadness and humour and a real appreciation for the small, explosively beautiful moments that every day offers us.

The speakers my readers can expect to meet are people who’ve seen it all, and I think a certain amount of dark humour comes through. I like to think of it as poetic xeriscaping.

Vallum concrete top crack#

I am always looking for that flower growing out of a crack in the concrete, or a bird’s nest on a creosote piling on the working river. My primary focus has been work poetry, but I also write portraits of people, and descriptions of landscapes (specifically the built/industrial environment) where one might think no beauty might be found. How would you describe your poetry? What kind of speakers can readers expect to meet in your work?Ĭhristina Shah: Hello Hannah, thank you very much for the invitation. Your words have an edge to them that to me is both empirical and raw. You have three poems in the latest issue of EVENT 49/3-”Scott,” “Rig Veda,” and “X-Ray Clinic”-that really stood out to me.

Hannah Macready: Hello Christina! Thank you so much for agreeing to chat with me. Brace yourselves for her first full-length collection, if: prey, then: huntress. Her poetry has also appeared in The Fiddlehead, Vallum, Arc, Grain, and PRISM international, with work forthcoming in The Antigonish Review and The Malahat Review. Christina Shah was born in Ottawa, lives in Vancouver, and works in heavy industry.