The Small Words In My Body
Kalamalka Press
Poetry
(Now published in the volume Grace and Poison with Turnstone Press)
Published when Connelly was twenty-one, this book won the Pat Lowther Award in 1991 for best poetry book of the year by a Canadian woman. Connelly wrote many of these poems when she was in her middle and late teens, but far from being juvenilia, they are fully accomplished works of art, by turns austere, brutal, and joyous. Charting a course through a childhood and adolescence marked by violence and suicide, the poet emerges into the unexpected and dazzling beauty of Southeast Asia and northern Spain. The collection as a whole becomes a travelogue of spirit, as a young woman steps gratefully into the world and into her own life even as she explores the shadows of the past.
REVIEWS
“A dazzling writer. This book will become a collector’s item so readers can see where the wonderful Karen Connelly began. Her metaphors are elegant, finely-tuned inventions. They take us into orbit but never leave behind the smells, tastes, and textures of the earth. I marvel at her sensuality, her startling insights, her rich and evocative music.”
— Lorna Crozier
“Connelly is a young writer, just 22 years old, but the originality and formality of her poems suggest a maturity beyond her years. These are carefully crafted works, constructed with exact detail and acumen. . . . At the heart of Connelly’s book lies an investigation into language as the essential tool of the poet, and in Part One, the word is made flesh. Language is not only tactile but visceral: thoughts, emotions, and the abstract are embodied in skin and blood, bone and sinew . . . What Connelly says about the Chinese language of her friend Junwei Qi, “the tongue is wind-touched/the words . . . danced from the lips”, is equally true of her own poems.”
— Quarry Literary Review
“Her main strength as a poet lies in her acute sensitivity to people . . . Harrowing images . . . abound in the collection and give it a tangy vigour. Connelly’s most poignant verses, though, deal with the death of her sister. . . In successive poems, the body goes from perfection to rot to bare bones, and “ribs, played by wind, whistle high silver songs.” . . . In a thoroughly modern, personal way, Connelly has described the wheel of life, death, and rebirth . . .”
— Dandelion Literary Review