28 | Sina Queyras | Swelles

Swelles
Vallum Chapbook Series No. 28
Sina Queyras

What happens when one’s greatest hopes and worst fears become realized? And when they become realized without one’s own agency? In the hands of others who are taking them up in breathtaking, and sometimes brutal ways? Pain, to quote from the British show Fleabag, is in us. Women are born with it, we use it, or it uses us. Pain directs us, it attracts, repulses, and drains: but it also makes us more willing to take more on, to take more up, to take in the grief and shit of others and it can completely upend us. Swelles is a way forward, an attempt to get one’s shifting body back on top of the life raft.

“I am still listening. Even when there is only
silence in the corridor of our origins
I am listening. Above me the rafters sift grey

light, my emotional palate this season is blame,
blame like a drum in my ear, a kind of razoring
into my third eye. Am I? Am I here, in time?”

Author’s Bio

Sina Queyras grew up on the road in western Canada and has since lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal. They are the author most recently of My Ariel (2017), MxT (2014) and Autobiography of Childhood (2011). Their previous collection of poetry, Expressway (2009), was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and a selection from that book won Gold in the National Magazine Awards. Lemon Hound (2006) won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Queyras lives in Montreal where they curate Writers Read and teach creative writing at Concordia.