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auto-da-fe
Carolyn Zonailo
blewointmentpress
Vancouver, B.C.
1978

This collection is Zonailo’s auto-da-fe, or “act of faith”—in her gift as a poet and her belief that the noumenal can be found in the everyday life that engages all of us. These poems, especially the ones about her Doukhobor heritage, form the foundation for her poetics. Contains unique and experimental prose poems as well as poetry.

Critical Praise for auto-da-fe

     …the poems, which on the whole speak with an unostentatious, clear colloquial voice at once lyrical and sturdy, a voice which, even when it is adopting the tone of a manifesto, does not over-insist on itself. The poems work at various levels, graphic and symbolic, but without rhetorical over-elaboration…"Initiation" is a fine example of Zonailo's central strength as a poet: her ability to render a multiplicity of meanings in a language at once graphic, kinetic, colloquial and cadenced…

     The series of prose pieces called "Myths of Heresy" are small parables which use the syntax of prose to subvert narrative, sequence, point of view. It is familiar territory, static, enigmatic, a place of gesture without motion, space without time. Central to the subversion of traditional meanings in these pieces is the figure of Circe, transformed from sorceress to goddess of plenitude; central to the subversion of narrative technique is the figure of the Jogger, that surreal image of our own time, who undermines the act of running by having no goal. The prose pieces are slight, indeterminate, they resist closure, with finesse; they call into question the existence of definitive story, but they leave us with language, with versions, with variety.

(author unknown)