Sleeping in Tall Grass

"My emptiness will not be

frenetic with the friction

of my father’s silences

but still as the unmarked graves

of his many forgotten selves"

— From "Salt"

A cycle of poems, Sleeping in Tall Grass takes an unsparing look at a painful, abusive, yet strangely redemptive family story enfolded within the body of the Canadian prairie itself—at once physical, historical, and metaphysical. These intensely personal poems reflect the complex relationships between sound and space, language and silence. Treating time as more layered than sequential, they reflect a process of organic composition distilled from Therrien’s iterative observations and utterances. This is writing that reaches "into the very grain of existence"—a sonorous re-presentation of the human presence on the dispassionate but eternally giving plains.