melanie brannagan frederiksen

NationalPoetryMonth.ca April 29, 2023

small goddess of lost causes/ amy’s song for two voices by melanie brannagan frederiksen is published on NationalPoetryMonth.ca on April 29, 2023.

From melanie:

“small goddess of lost causes/ amy’s song for two voices” is part of a series of polyvocal narrative poems, small goddessess// lost causes, that explores the estrangement of two sisters, the traumas that caused that estrangement and those that emerge from it, and, most importantly, what happens next, after the revelation?

The two voices in this poem are intended to be understood as occurring simultaneously, the chorus a kind of summative narration, telling us where to look (here, it’s more-or-less accurate, if a bit idiosyncratic about the first things it wants to attend to. but, like in ancient Greek plays, it isn’t really outside the action; consequentially, it’s not always correct and its allegiances shift), and amy, so caught in the terror of her race to outrun “memory’s/ mouths” that it comprises her whole vision.

This poem, specifically, occurs early in the manuscript and is an opening to consider what it took for amy to survive and escape. At this point in the manuscript, the costs and consequences of that are only just becoming apparent. This is also the first suggestion in the manuscript that, for amy, running away wasn’t a sufficient form of escape.

If i could say just one thing about my work more generally, it’s that, whatever i’m writing about (whether that’s trauma or memory or mental illness or family), i’m interested in how a poem is on a page (or a screen) and how space and silence can be made to resonate and with what.”

melanie brannagan frederiksen (she/her) lives and writes in Winnipeg, on Treaty One territory. She is the author of the chapbook poseidon's cove, athena's cave (Model Press 2021). Her poems have been published in +doc: a journal of longer poems, The Winnipeg Free Press, Contemporary Verse 2, and Prairie Fire.

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