Arleen Paré Poetry

Arleen Paré, based in Victoria, BC, has written nine collections of poetry. She has been short-listed for the BC Dorothy Livesay BC Award for Poetry and won the American Golden Crown Award for Poetry, the Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Award, and a Governor Generals’ Award for Poetry. In September 2020, Arleen Paré’s nineteen-year-old grandson moved into the basement of her home to attend courses nearby. After suffering a bout of severe anxiety and depression, he was forced to drop out of his second-year computer science program after one month. In an effort to quell her own feelings of helplessness and growing anxiety about the situation, Paré turned to poetry. Encrypted is an honest and illuminating narrative of a life arrested and a home haunted by grief. Poetic Appetizer we make of ourselves how we move through the world I have made of myself a long river of words a plain flatlands meander of words looping back looping ahead the Old Testament posits the Word words being the main way we open and close take me away bring me back night comes and the sky stops in its heedless rotation if you have made of yourself a door in time can you make it to open even halfway