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Cutting My Mother's Hair / Stephanie McKenzie

Cutting My Mother's Hair

By: Stephanie McKenzie

€12.00 €6.00
In this uncompromising collection, Stephanie McKenzie guides us through an Inferno of female 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'v...
ISBN 1 903392 52 7
Pub Date Saturday, April 01, 2006
Cover Image Michael Pitman
Page Count 80
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In this uncompromising collection, Stephanie McKenzie guides us through an Inferno of female 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

Stephanie McKenzie has published two other collections of poetry with Salmon, Cutting My Mother’s Hair (2006) and Grace Must Wander (2009), and a monograph, Before the Country: Native Renaissance: Canadian Mythology,  with the University of Toronto Press (2007). She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Toronto. McKenzie was born and raised in British Columbia but lives on the opposite Canadian coast now in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. She teaches in the English Programme at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University, where she is an Associate Professor.



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