Mortal Arguments

Mortal Arguments is Sue Sinclair’s second poetry collection. In it, she continues her extraordinary phenomenological investigation of lived experience, addressing with increasing urgency issues of profound philosophical and political importance such as consumerism, privilege, and our ability to respond to the suffering of others. Her voice combines great metaphorical brilliance with the depth one expects of a much older writer. Her poems will remind readers by turns of Rilke and Heine: urgent, sorrowing, ecstatic. This is an important book by one of Canada’s finest young poets.RosesNot because it is sufficient, but becausewe subsist on light, and what doesn’tcry out to be noticed? There’s something hereyou might recognize, but you’re not sure; still, you’re willingto risk it: the loss of everything, seen and unseen,the before and the after. It doesn’t depend on youbut you move toward it. Because as long as there’s a momenthere or there, why not arrange a few rosesin a jar, give thought to their listlessness, how they gatherthe room about them yet think nothing of it, how eachthorn persists, how they have made a purposeof holding still? Then you rememberthe necessary and sufficient. This isn’t it,but you don’t know where else to begin.