Literary Matchmakers: Jenny Offill and Talya Rubin
Today’s Literary Match features two gifted authors who write towards the hum and thrum of climate disaster. If you liked Jenny Offill’s Weather, you simply must read Talya Rubin’s Iceland Is Melting and So Are You.
Offill is a master of brevity, and Weather captures glimpses of climate anxiety amidst the doldrums of daily existence. Between meals and workdays, there is talk of doomsteads, climatology, disappearing bees, and whether dread might be channelled into action.
Those who feel pangs of meaning in Offill’s fragmentary forms will relish Rubin’s even further distillation. Poetry is an economy of language, after all. And the swift and careful images which make up Iceland Is Melting and So Are You guide the reader towards an ever-deepening encounter with the climate crisis. With a sharpened eye and an elongated gaze, Rubin explores the way human and wild meet in the everyday: the melting of ice sheets and fathoming ecological disaster while listening to news reports on the radio; moments of childhood ice skating and unrequited love alongside geological formations and weather patterns.
Like Offill, Rubin is alive to ironies and hypocrisies. Underlying her collection is a mild sense of absurdity, one that mirrors our existential plight of continuing on in the face of what feels like impossibility. At the same time, she is less likely to release them with a sigh. Iceland Is Melting is filled with genuine feeling, complex grief, and earnest wonderment. It is these qualities that make it a necessary guide, tonic, and companion to those who look head on towards the future.
Read more about Talya Rubin’s stunning sophomore collection Iceland Is Melting and So Are You here!
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That’s all for now dear reader. Iceland Is Melting and So Are You is available to purchase from our online shop or from your local independent bookstore today!
PS) A reminder that you can save 25% off Iceland Is Melting and So Are You (and all in stock titles) until December 24, 2021, as part of our annual Holiday Sale.
Talya Rubin is a Canadian poet originally from Montreal. She was awarded the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada in 1998. Her poetry has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Montreal International Poetry Prize. In 2015, she won the Battle of the Bards and was invited to read at the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Her first collection, Leaving the Island, was published in 2015. Talya holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She also runs a theatre company called Too Close to the Sun, and currently lives in Perth, Australia with her husband and son.
