Aortic Caprice

"[In] Gail Sidonie Sobat's AORTIC CAPRICE ... I can see how the metaphor draws the curtain back on the overall structure of the book. The volume is broken (as the heart is broken) into two movements, diastole and systole, the heart muscle relaxing and contracting respectively." In the relaxing diastole movement, we have poems of letting go (of deceased loved ones), aging, autumn and harvest. The contracting systole movement returns us to the concerns of sexual love and desire, with in particular an honest, unapologetic, erotic poem on an older woman's desire for a younger man, 'forbidden fruit': 'had your eyes not sought me out / would your youth / have passed by not touching / mine passing? though we may be a string untuned / discordant with our universes / I'd like to weave with you / in and out of time and space / to warp and weft the bias / of this very narrow world." - Jeffery Donaldson, U of T Quarterly 74:1

“Remembering that there are positive and negative, or apocalyptic and demonic, forms for each variation, the structure of the book makes an interesting point of its own, that our hearts are bound to a cycle of desire and release, attachment and loss, and that the poems we write repeat, and help to see us through, the intractable rhythm.” - Jeffery Donaldson, U of T Quarterly 74:1