Signature Editions

Swimming Into The Light

About the book
About the author
Excerpt

Shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Poetry Award

Swimming into the Light is a sequence of poems charting a woman's struggle with infertility and her entry into motherhood through the back door of international adoption. The book traces these events in a connected narrative, from her frustration and despair over infertility to the uncertainty of international adoption and rescuing a new life from a war-torn country, and finally to the quiet reflections on motherhood. Shortlisted for the QSPELL A.M. Klein Poetry award, Swimming into the Light has recently been translated into French and published by Écrits des forges as La fille au bord de l'eau.

Carolyn Marie Souaid has been writing and publishing poetry for over 20 years. The author of six books and the winner of the David McKeen Award for her first collection, Swimming into the Light, she has also been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Much of her work deals with the bridging of worlds; the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility of it, but the necessity of the struggle. She has toured her work across Canada and in France. Since the 1990s, she has been a key figure on the Montreal literary scene, having co-produced two major local events, Poetry in Motion (the poetry-on-the-buses project) and the Circus of Words / Cirque des mots, a multidisciplinary, multilingual cabaret focusing on the "theatre" of poetry. Souaid is a founding member and editor of Poetry Quebec, an online magazine focusing on the English language poets and poetry of Quebec.

Baby Tech

The tests don't matter, not the icy probe
of his finger, not the flood of purple dye into
the beaten bag of my womb, nothing matters
but the promise of a would-be fetus, fragile
as the wobbling foal
in barn light.

In his lab, bits of women
float in flasks like grains of Aspirin
in a chaos of ginger ale. The one bitter pill
of their lives.

They line up at his door—
their shaman, their priest, God, whatever—
thumbing magazines, eyeing one another, eyeing
his diplomas, like glittering icons on the wall
waiting to see who won, who failed
whose experiment took, whose didn't
they'll all be back next month for more tests
more consultations, they'll lean across his desk
opening their bodies to him
in confession
praying for mercy.

The Fertile Crescent

Bedouin women
in a cobbler's doorway
cross-legged with their baskets
of eggs & vine leaves

eyewhites, a dull glaze

babies in their laps
like steaming loaves of bread.

Death is a distant country to them
a great, green curve of land
where ancestors wait unburdened—

mosaic of upturned faces
like golden plates of fruit
in the sun.