Anchoress

Awake before dawn a year after Helen's death, Peter begins to assemble memories of his lover. But how to conjure the dead? How to put a lover's body together again? In his laboratory Peter is restoring the skeleton of a whale. But in his notebook, he scrawls pieces of Helen's story and of their story together. Slowly, he begins to see the secret tunnels between Helen's
death and the deaths of her parents, between Helen's loyalty to her sister and her passion for right action.

A sensual, haunting book-length poem by a highly original Canadian writer, Anchoress moves gracefully from the painted caves of Vichy France where Helen's mother is born, to the banks of the Seine where her parents meet; from a foster home in Illinois to the greystone university buildings where Helen becomes obsessed with the televised events of the Gulf War. This remarkable book challenges the way we think about the boundaries between politics and passion, war and love, fiction and poetry.