The Time Between

In The Time Between, poems burrow deep inside rusty rooms, the brachiated hearts of sleepless women, the anguish pounding the fault lines of monsoons and long rains, the sheets of ancient wound and anger, the littered and abandoned alleyways of shell-shocked hamlets and towns. The infinitude of time sears, no greater or less than the mind and memory recovers through the stubborn hissing of distant flames burning. Time runs, ambivalent to grief.

To be you and I, to be like us, to be the blade caught in the metal cage of seconds, minutes, hours -- to be man, woman and child now, in the time between -- to be at home here in the world. To know how hard it is to bleed, to carry the silence that unceasingly grows dim and dark, Why eyes look outward, not inward.

These poems nibble at arguments, re-enact double lives of betrayed dreams, invent the beatitude of mourning, yet always seeking, always on the lookout for the radiance of hope that resists fading at dawn.

The Time Between is poet Patria Rivera's fourth poetry collection. Her first poetry collection, Puti/White, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She has also co-authored two chapbooks, Weathering: An Exchange of Poems and Sixth from the Sixth. Rivera's poetry is featured in Oxford University Press's Perspectives in Ideology, and in Elana Wolff's Implicate me: Short essays on reading contemporary poems. Her poems have also been published in the Literary Review of Canada, Fireweed, and other Canadian and international publications. In 1997 Rivera won an honourable mention in the ARC Poetry Magazine Second Annual Poem of the Year Contest for her poem, "Living on the borders, dying in the margins." In 2005 her poem "Rare species" was selected as the second-prize winner in the QWERTY'sEric Hill Award of Poetic Excellence competition. Rivera has received fellowships from the Writers' Union of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle International Writers' Retreat Centre in Scotland. She was also a recipient of the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry. Born and raised in the Philippines, Rivera graduated with a journalism degree from the University of the Philippines. She has also undertaken media and editing studies at the International Training Institute in Sydney, Australia, the International Institute for Journalism in Berlin, Germany, and the Nieman Centre for Journalism at Harvard University.