Afar

Poems by A. L. Westin

Artwork by Kate Young

Digitally printed on Holcomb 100% cotton-rag paper

Cover printed letterpress on St. Armand Canal paper

32pp | ISBN: 978-1-9990537-1-0

Includes a letterpress-printed keepsake

$18 cad

Debut poetry collection by poet, philosopher, and singer A. L. Westin, with illustrations by Kate Young.

The poems in Afar are filled with beautiful qualities of light and storm and sea. They speak to moments – both domestic and grand – with a care-filled attention that lets Westin’s Nordic sensibility shine through. Her imagery puts one in mind of the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer; there is something Hopkinsesque about her delight in the texture of her language and the mouthfeel of her words; and then, too, one is apt to meet Emily Dickinson in her genius for off/slant/mid-line rhymes. In short, her work does what all really good writing does: it folds the voices of the tradition inside its own voice, and then goes on to say something truly new with the result.

Kate Young’s images, with their dreamy invocations of weather – both noetic and meteorological – shimmer alongside the poems, lending the collection as a whole a rhythm that is as grounded as it is surprising.