Click to enlarge.

Wading the Trout River
Carolyn Zonailo
Empyreal Press
Montreal, Quebec
1997

The four sections of Wading the Trout River contain lyric poems that explore such themes as love and the nature of union; masculine/ feminine roles; the perception of the divine in connection to the everyday. These poems offer insight into what it means to be contained by gender, time, consciousness and geography.

Zonailo sees life with the poet's eye, the lover's eye. It is not only romantic love, but love in all its forms—love for creation. Zonailo finds poetry and affirmation in much that she sees, whether it be nature, an old woman, or an eccentric doorman. This is a world held together with love, and passionately evoked in poetry.

Critical Praise for Wading the Trout River

     “Wading the Trout River is a mature and intelligent collection of lyric poems mostly dedicated to love and to an examination of gender roles. It celebrates heterosexual romance and sensuality without being heterosexist. The poems are also not in any way narrowly personal. They spread their wings to draw on religion (‘The Tree of Knowledge’ and ‘The Tree of Life’), pop psychology (‘Venus Envy’), and the minutiae of everyday life (‘Letters of the Alphabet’). This is a wonderful, touching, insightful book.”

Don Precosky, Canadian Book Review Annual

“Zonailo's Wading the Trout River speaks to the power of influence and attests to the influence of Judeo-Christian discourse on our grappling with the ineffable. This collection likewise moves through four different sections: ‘Geographies of the Heart,’ which offers a number of memorable portraits of human compassion and vanity; ‘The Male Nudes,’ which resurrects ‘the divine masculine’ from ‘the reckonings of our gendered selves’; ‘Twin Souls,’ which plays with notions of self, shadow, and romantic love; and ‘Letters of the Alphabet,’ which infuses each letter with romantic expectation and desire.”

Susan Drodge, Canadian Literature