Incarnate
by Juleta Severson-Baker
The erotic impulse is embodied in Incarnate through a passionate wrestling with image and form. Juleta Severson-Baker wills memory and desire onto the page until “the seduction is complete”. The force of these poems is palpable. Readers witness the poet take a polluted river into her “belly like a snake takes a venomous toad”, experience orgasm as birth, and hike above tree line to ultimately “hear what I came to know”. The poetry in Incarnate is a sensuous plunging into the body. Readers will emerge grateful for the book’s manifestation of experience, and for the human body itself.
$15.95 CAD
Additional information
| Weight | .185 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 9 × 6 × .25 in |
| Page Count | 90 |
| Binding | Soft Cover |
| Year Published | 2013 |
Juleta Severson-Baker
Juleta Severson-Baker is of settler heritage and was born and raised on Treaty 7 land in Calgary. She is an educator and poet whose first book, Incarnate (Frontenac House, 2013), was shortlisted for the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize for Poetry. Her most recent collection of poetry, Antecedent (Frontenac House, 2023) was shortlisted for the WGA’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Juleta has been a teacher and administrator at Calgary Arts Academy, a speech arts and drama instructor at Mount Royal University’s Conservatory, a birth doula and a 911 call taker. In other identities, she is a mom of two amazing humans, a lover of nature and spending time outside, and a fierce believer in imagining a future where we transition to a sustainable economy and where all people are free.
“Incarnate is a brilliant collection of poems that capture the tension between the quotidian and the miraculous –“the hiccups-of-magic in the world” – recognizing that the two inform every moment of the day. Both intimate and wide ranging, sensuous and spiritual, sorrowful and ecstatically joyful, these poems celebrate everything that is human, and blend observation with secure craftsmanship. Juleta Severson-Baker observes the world with love and precision, and through her vision, enlarges our own. This is a book to be grateful for.”
~Rosemary Griebel, author of Yes
“The sensuality of Juleta’s poems is obvious in the first word. That’s not easy to do: make words feel like moving lips. And the pleasure of them will be clear, too, when someone, feeling these poems, will not be content with an empty room, and say them out loud. I’ve known the mourning in this book, and I know that the words for that loss were waiting here all along. What delights me most, though, in reading all these poems together is the way they teach us that everything in life waits for the language to make it more than real.
“Metaphor erupts in these poems, most evidently in the surreal “Leaving,” but once you see it in one or two poems, you see it in all of Juleta’s poetry. Poetry is the most that can be wrung from language, and the most vivid images in it are the ones that were never seen until made incarnate in art.”
~Richard Harrison