Splinters & Streams by Daphne Marlatt

Description

Poetry/Literature  ISBN 978-1-946104-61-8   Poetry/Literature  Published August 7 2025   $15
Limited edition of 150 copies. Immediately available.

Daphne Marlatt is an award-winning poet, dramatist, and novelist. Among her earlier poetry titles are Steveston and Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now.  Her novels include Ana Historic (Coach House 1988, Anansi 2013) and Taken (1996). The Given received the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award. A Pangaea Arts production of her contemporary Canadian Noh play The Gull was awarded the international Uchimura Naoya Prize in 2008 and in 2012 she was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Talonbooks has published Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1968-2008 edited by Susan Holbrook. Shadow Catch (Talonbooks, 2023), a Noh-like libretto for chamber opera, has received 2 productions in Vancouver, the first in 2010 and again in 2022.

Daphne Marlatt’s work has been described as including “such acuity of hush and cadence,” creating “sound that is space inhabiting her body, becoming ours” (Erín Moure). Sina Queyras has described her as “a singular voice in Canadian poetry,” which is undoubtably true, yet we think she is a singular voice in all poetry of the 20th and 21st Centuries. 

SPLINTERS & STREAMS is a singular work comprising 17 poems, including works dedicated to poets Roy Kiyooka, Phyllis Webb, Lorine Niedecker, and more. The poems show the world, of which we are a part, in which we are wholly integrated, in which petals, catalpas, monarchs, mulberries, roots, tenders, and bodies (including our bodies) find community. The book raises our concern with the planet and what it encompasses to the levels of inspirational being. The beautiful cover and frontispiece, by Tucson artist Linda Rosenfield, suggests immersion in a world or stream of living beings of color. Limited to 150 hand-numbered copies.