Trailer Park Shakes By Justene Dion-Glowa Brick Books 96 pages, $24 Justene Dion-Glowa’s first full-length poetry book, Trailer Park Shakes, considers how one finds strength in grieving a lifetime of injustice, poverty, trauma, family violence, and the loss of a...
How had Marguerite ended up on that phantom island, the Île des Démons, crawling inside a dark cave surrounded by wild wolverines and hungry, snarling bears? What scandalous affair aboard the ship had led to her abandonment? These insatiable curiosities fill the writer’s mind, and she is swept away in research, trying to escape her own time by imagining life in the 16th century.
In the six-page preface, Principe takes great care to write that her book is not: an apology for suicide, a comprehensive review of suicide, a history of suicide, an argument for or against suicide, judgment, or a response to suicide that is without love.