Canada's National Post on Sina Queyras's M x T

Mark Medley at Canada's National Post reviews Sina Queyras's newest collection of poems, M x T. The title, M x T stands for "Memory x Time"—a possible equation to quantify grief. From National Post:

The cover of M x T, the Montreal poet Sina Queyras’s first collection in five years, is deliciously deceiving: Hot pink, like Kool-Aid, and slapped with a bold silver X that suggests something lewd may be hiding inside.

“I know there are going to be a lot of disappointed 15-year-old girls that can’t find what they’re looking for in there,” deadpans Queyras, sitting in a Toronto coffee shop on a recent afternoon. The cover was the brainchild of her longtime editor Alana Wilcox. Queyras only had one rule when it came to its design: “I did not want anything that looked like death.”

Readers will find more than enough of that inside the book. These are poems that mourn, celebrate, and elegize, sometimes in the span of a single page. A collection haunted by more ghosts than a graveyard, the dead who populate M x T won’t leave Queyras alone. “The dead have no weight but they stomp nonetheless,” she writes. “They hold hands in long lines; they are determined to be heard, to be seen: look at me, they say, diving in and out of the earth like porpoises, look at me.”

“Why is the relationship of poetry so enmeshed with the dead, you know?” asks Queyras, somewhat rhetorically. “Why is it? Is it because poets are the ones who will look at [death]? Because, when people die, people come to poets. I get people asking me all the time, ‘What should I read at this funeral? Will you write me a poem?’ And, I’ve said this elsewhere, so now I’m going to be inundated, but I feel like contemporary poets should try and deal with that.”
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Read more at the National Post.