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Cutting My Mother's Hair Poems by STEPHANIE McKENZIE
With illustrations by Michael Pittman
In this uncompromising collection, Stephanie McKenzie guides us through an Inferno ofÊfemale outcasts like a compassionate and committed Virgil. The encounter that she orchestrates between Dante, Newfoundland and Canada is provocative, illuminating and extremely powerful. The voices that address us along the way are dignified and unforgettable: there are no victims ('let everyone / on the ferry at Port-aux-Basques / know I've had seven good years'), but we are left with no doubt about who the real sinners are ('the government chews its way to graves'). We reach the depths of Hell but Paradise can be just round the corner ('Let them paint a boat. They can row out of hell').
Maria Cristina Fumagalli, University of Essex (Author of The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante)
Cutting My Mother's Hair is a contemporary, feminist engagement with Dante's Inferno. It is also a portrait of society's lack of compassion for those who suffer from mental health issues. Taking as its inspiration this great Italian epic, Cutting My Mother's Hair depicts contemporary women in various stages of domestic hell and interrogates their familial and social inheritance of patriarchy. The last and fourth section of this book, 'The S Collection', creates a fictional story of two women caught in the rings of the Inferno, suffering breakdown, and for whom there is no compassion.
Stephanie McKenzie is a poet, editor and publisher. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto where she specialized in Aboriginal literature in Canada. McKenzie is president and founder of Scop Productions Inc., a west coast Newfoundland publishing house and production company. She is co-editor and co-publisher of However Blow the Winds: An Anthology of Poetry and Song from Newfoundland & Labrador and Ireland (2004) and The Backyards of Heaven: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from Newfoundland & Labrador (2003) and is publisher and co-editor of Humber Mouths: Young Voices from the West Coast of Newfoundland & Labrador. ÊWith Martin Ware, McKenzie also co-edited An Island in the Sky: Selected Poetry of Al Pittman (Breakwater Books, St. John's, 2003).
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