“National Poetry Month” #6: Sandra Ridley

From “Testamonium”, The Counting House

XV.

You began with love. Unfailing. Intended invariably. Love always involves a degree of pain.
In that. Constancy.

The possessor never explicitly admitted or denied. Nor alleviated.

The discreet lasts only a moment. Comes vengeful.

                                                                                    The morning before.

                                                                                                          The decline.

                                                                                                                              The spectacle.

Your hold on her body shall not entirely disappear.

– SANDRA RIDLEY

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The above poem is taken from Sandra Ridley’s forthcoming book The Counting House, which we are very excited to be publishing this fall.

SANDRA RIDLEY’S first full-length collection of poetry, Fallout, won the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing, the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, and was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. Her second book, Post-Apothecary, was short-listed for the 2012 ReLit and Archibald Lampman Awards. Also in 2012, Ridley won the International Festival Of Authors’ Battle of the Bards and was featured in The University of Toronto’s Influency Salon. Twice a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, Ridley is the author of two chapbooks, Rest Cure – and Lift, for which she was co-recipient of the bpNichol Chapbook Award.