Full Moon of Afraid and Craving (The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)

A playful examination of the charged dynamic between home and abroad, between anxiety and desire. Confronting addiction, compulsions, and anxieties, this collection explores the combination of wonder and longing that makes a life. Melanie Power’s poems commemorate ordinary moments and everyday characters – a roadside shopkeeper, a neighbourhood linden tree, a great-uncle’s hooch – tracing the unsettling shadows that border joy. A hometown is a data centre / where the past is stored From a darkly humorous perspective, this book charts a young person's navigation of narrow definitions of faith, femininity, and family. Confronting addiction, compulsions, and anxieties, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving explores the strange combination of wonder and longing that makes a life. Across settings rural and urban, Melanie Power's poems commemorate ordinary moments and everyday characters: a roadside shopkeeper, a neighbourhood linden tree, a great-uncle's hooch. Interrogating lineage and inheritance, she traces the unsettling shadows that border joy. A series of ambivalent odes pay a winking, Proustian homage to the sense memories of a Roman Catholic millennial upbringing in Newfoundland. The long poem "The Fever and the Fret," written during pandemic lockdown in Montreal, considers how we re-examine and consolidate our personal and civic pasts in times of crisis, drawing timely parallels to John Keats's confinement due to illness exactly two centuries prior. At times wry and lighthearted, at others elegiac and plaintive, the voices in these poems are controlled and confident. Just as the stars in the sky are best viewed at night, this collection embraces darkness to illuminate rays of moonlight. "From a darkly humorous perspective, this book charts a young person's navigation of narrow definitions of faith, femininity, and family. Confronting addiction, compulsions, and anxieties, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving explores the strange combination of wonder and longing that makes a life. Across settings rural and urban, Melanie Power's poems commemorate ordinary moments and everyday characters: a roadside shopkeeper, a neighbourhood linden tree, a great-uncle's hooch. Interrogating lineage and inheritance, she traces the unsettling shadows that border joy. A series of ambivalent odes pay a winking, Proustian homage to the sense memories of a Roman Catholic millennial upbringing in Newfoundland. The long poem "Risanamento," written during pandemic lockdown in Montreal, considers how we re-examine and consolidate our personal and civic pasts in times of crisis, drawing timely parallels to John Keats's confinement due to illness exactly two centuries prior. At times wry and lighthearted, at others elegiac and plaintive, the voices in these poems are controlled and confident. Just as the stars in the sky are best viewed at night, this collection embraces darkness to illuminate rays of moonlight."-- Provided by publisher. Cover Copyright Contents Ode to McCain’s Deep’n Delicious Cake The Real Pleiades Your Past Selves Attend Your Birthday Party Basel Penpal Ode to Great-Uncle Will’s Shine Light of a Fractured Moon After Apple-Picking If You Answer Yes to Any of the Following Questions Elegy to 17 After Midnight Ode to the 1⁄2 Moon Antigonish at Dawn It hurt to be nowhere Magic Show I Should Have Guessed Names like quartz in the mouth Harvest Picking Season Across the Marshes Archipelago Ode to Tunnock’s Caramel Log Frost in October Roman Aubade Ode to Sleep Sfogliatella Elegy for the Linden Tree Iceberg in Ferryland Power’s Store My Father’s Father I have not always been as careful as I am now The Fever and the Fret I. Rue Garnier II. Avenue Querbes III. Avenue St-Marc IV. Rue Clark V. Rue Saint-Dominique VI. Avenue de Normanville I come home to remember why I have to leave again Shaar Hashomayim Cemetery Andromeda The stone Purple Balloons Notes Acknowledgments