Prairie Spirit(s) Wide Release

I am very excited to be able to share this poetry collection today! I released this exclusively on my Patreon some time ago, but as of today it is available to the big, wide world as well 🙂

Rather than reinvent the wheel, please allow me to share the Introduction from this collection with you here.

Introduction

In April 2021 the theme I’d given myself for Robert Lee Brewer’s April Poem-a-Day challenge was ‘Agrarian Decay’ which I chose largely because I wanted to write about where I grew up in rural southern Alberta.

I’ve spoken frequently about the conflict I feel about where I come from–in so many ways I was a terrible fit for many of the people I was surrounded with growing up, but that hasn’t decreased the connection I feel with the place. And as I sat down to begin this PAD challenge I was homesick (landsick?). I hadn’t been any further from my home in Edmonton than I could walk in over a year because of a combination of the pandemic and problems with my right hip. So I was nostalgic and yearning and I thought I’d write about where I came from.

Perhaps I should have chosen ‘Homesick/landsick’ as my theme but I love the word ‘Agrarian’ and while looking for something to pair it with Decay just fit. So I thought, “Okay, let’s explore this then… it’s not exactly about where you came from, but it could be a fun filter to look at it through.”

The first poems I wrote were full of frozen moments that included abandoned homes scoured grey by wind and time, wooden wagons with wheels buried up to the axle at the corner of a field and rusted out bodies of cars lined up in a row from oldest to newest. But it only took until day three before the first ghost appeared.

I invited it in, wrote about it (that poem eventually grew up to be “The Longest Journey”) and then sent it on its way while I attempted another non-speculative poem about my chosen theme.

The next day some demons showed up–just sort of appeared fully formed on the page. I exorcised them from my brain to the page in a poem that eventually became “Relic” and tried to get back to my theme. Alas, then there were werewolves, and more ghosts… I got back to something non-speculative a few days later but even though it was rural it didn’t fit my theme.

That’s when I finally got it. The theme wasn’t going to work. I wasn’t writing about agrarian decay, I was writing about the prairies–about the spirit of the prairies as recalled from my childhood as I stewed in a very particular combination of nostalgia, sadness and homesickness, and also about fictional spirits which might inhabit that landscape.

I’ve gathered together some of the best examples of what I wrote for my new theme–Prairie Spirit(s)–into this collection, and tucked in a few poems I’d written before that also fit.

The resulting collection is mostly speculative (meaning it has elements of fantasy, science fiction or horror) but has some non-genre poems sprinkled throughout, as well as one or two which straddle the line between and can fully be interpreted either way.

Almost all of these poems are dark and many deal with death (including of children and animals) so they might be best taken in small doses with your shields in place unless, of course, you prefer stepping into the haunted house with no flashlight. To each their own.

Rhonda Parrish
Edmonton, Alberta
10/29/2022