Lise Gaston Davidson is a writer, academic, and teacher. Her poetry collection, Cityscapes in Mating Season, was published with Signature editions in 2017: you can order it here. Her poem James won the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize. Her current academic book project is a book entitled Moving Bodies: Women’s Property and Narrative Form in the Romantic Novel. She is a faculty member in the English Department at Douglas College. Discover more about Lise’s creative and academic work below.
“Here is a poem written with the sensitivity of a monarch landing on the palm-side of a wrist. Its beauty and pain are expressed with a profound emotional intelligence that pulls the reader inward and outward again. In its appreciation of its subject, James invites such wonder and asks what it might take to break the social taboo still attached to the loss of an infant. It is an aching joy to read.”
“Poetry as direct transmission: it’s a desire that, in our contemporary times, seems almost a betrayal of the human condition, but of course it’s just the opposite. Lise Gaston’s debut collection is a reminder of poetry’s potential, not to heal, or even to console, but to speak directly of everything with whatever is at hand: Dorothy Wordsworth’s split oak, banana slugs, car alarms, riot shields.”
“Lise Gaston’s gorgeous poems are strange, and terrifying, and lovely. From the polluted run-off of her urban Styx, to the labyrinthine cityscapes of the human heart, these poems step away from the safety of lighted streets, seeking to know ‘the dark on its own terms.’ Tense, compassionate, and sharp as a broken bottle, Cityscapes in Mating Season cuts to the quick. This is an exquisite debut.”
“These are unsettling poems, skillfully rendered. The run-on phrasing, the lines that jam into one another, jar the reader out of complacency and broken-mirror a city in heat. I so admire how Lise Gaston’s deftness of touch and fierce intelligence ignite the ordinary until familiar urban streets burn with desire. ‘No alleys unbent,’ she tells us. This is the kind of new, vibrant voice I’ve been waiting to hear.”
