Finalist 2017 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-926794-35-8
$18.95 CDN / $17.95 US | Trade Paperback
September 2016
Between imperial dinners and managing investments, Lady Crawford offers a rare glimpse of the inner-life of a woman who has married into a royal lineage. Chronicled in a series of metamorphic poems, Julie Cameron Gray reports from a world filled with parties and art before revealing the cost of an identity shed, as so many married women before her. Heartbreaking, drunken, and lavish, Lady Crawford is a powerful second collection from one of Canada’s best poets.
Praise for Lady Crawford
An impressive transformation has occurred from Tangle, Cameron Gray’s debut, to Lady Crawford: writing out the small familiar tragedy of we live, we sorrow, this wrecking-ball of a book smashes myths of femininity. It is as if this poet woke from the slumber of a young woman’s dreams and, seeing how all the dreams were broken, set about describing her experience of the broken castle as more than lies—as cultural reconstruction. Among many other feats, this beautiful poetry of impassioned reason ironizes the lives of famous women as heart broken. Reading it, our hearts are broken as our hearts were, once, already.—Shane Neilson
This absorbing book of poems by Julie Cameron Gray eschews abstraction in favour of finely honed narratives about women lost in identities they chose wrongly (or that were chosen for them). Lady Crawford features careening, sexy stories of lost youth and self-aggrandizing fantasies of triumph.—Lennyletter.com (What Lena Dunham Is Reading)
“Like a fascinating woman you met a party once years ago and can’t seem to forget, the characters that inhabit these poems are strange and exotic; from famous artists and wealthy dowagers to groupies and teenage skinheads. Entertaining, engrossing, and accessible, these are poems from an eclectic range of viewpoints examining the inherent need to strive for something beyond our current grasp, no matter what we have – skinheads, hipsters trying to go off the grid, Georgia O’Keeffe, or Harry Houdini’s wife.—All Lit Up
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