The poems in Light-carved Passages knot and weave, tracing connections through tangles of family histories, and paths along rivers. Shadows and absences permeate the collection as does an intensity of personal focus. Some sequences wind themselves into dark corners, while others feel around for a light switch on the wall, or glimpse a glow somewhere far ahead. There is vulnerability at the core of Light-carved Passages, and a quest to hill lacks by divining their true names, while acknowledging the implacable tenacity of the unnamable. But in travelling the “passages carved by light,” the poems carry a sense of movement, indeed of momentum, though the road dips and ever loops back upon itself.
Light-carved Passages
Doubleback Books,
August 2024
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For the 10th anniversary of its original publication, Doubleback Books, an imprint of the US-based Sundress Publications, has reisssued my debut collection in a free, open access downloadable PDF, with a beautiful new cover! It was first published fall 2014 by BuschekBooks.
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Praise for Light-carved Passages:
“Light-carved Passages is a rich, rewarding collection of poems that range from lyrical snapshots of daily life to disarmingly honest and deeply potent ghost-walks into the heart’s dark, forbidden zones.”
–John Steffler, former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate
“An overall composure to the writing gives her words a rare dash of grace. But make no mistake, there’s a heart that can break here as well, a vulnerability that makes the lines shimmer with tension.”
–Barry Dempster, Canadian poet and novelist
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“Boyle deploys all of that fine classic imagery [chiaroscuro, the play of light and shadow], giving it an excellent contemporary makeover.... But she also does a heck of a lot more...There are passages carved by light, for sure, but also a bit of a sound and light show with lines that whirr and flash and dazzle, as well" –Rob Thomas – review on Apt. 613
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“Rich in imagery, attentive to language and music, the poems have a strong narrative style, often so intensely personal that the reader winces alongside the speaker’s strain. Loyal to the bonds between women ... Dedications to poets such as Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Brecken Hancock indicate Boyle’s apprenticeship to poems that plumb emotion, secrets, and family history. As a whole the collection speaks to lived experience."
–Danielle Janess – The Malahat Review
“In often hauntingly beautiful phrases, Frances endows the everyday with the profound and the deeply humane. Her touch is perfect in these poems, it gives us grace and patience and wonder in equal measure. A wise book, it kept me warm and grateful long after I had read it."
–Deborah-Anne Tunney –49th Shelf
Openwork and Limestone
Frontenac House
November 2022
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From the publisher: “Openwork and Limestone is a finely-wrought and potent new poetry collection from one of Canada’s most compelling poets. In Frances Boyle’s powerful vision, the rituals of contemporary women are seen through the lens of Celtic warrior queens, and goddesses. The natural and created worlds—as they run, as Boyle says, “through the funnel / of my palms”—are a constant source of awe and woman’s strength. A reverie that allows in the brutality of history and prehistory, as well as the joys. “The unconscious / swimming upward. What won’t stay buried rises / through rocks, rough-ridden and rusty.” Boyle’s Openwork and Limestone turns inward and outward at the same time, telling our multifarious collective human story so that it feels like our own intimate family history.”
Praise for Openwork and Limestone!
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Frances Boyle’s Openwork and Limestone is aptly named, full of poems that are bare and searing, and rooted in place and time. These imagistic poems allow the reader-listener to journey with the speaker across various landscapes, questioning and searching. Running through this book is the tension of a body caught between cogitation and wildness: in these pages is a longing to feel fully alive in the body – a yearning to be with and know the world intimately, physically, viscerally. Here too are reflections on relation: mother and daughter, daughter with father, sister to sister. Precious here is a way for us to move through this complex and fleeting world: “Balance / eludes me until I begin / to feel part of a larger mass / ages of river-work.”
~ Doyali Islam, author of Heft
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In Openwork and Limestone, Frances Boyle collapses the past and present to allow myth to inform lived experience and magic to mingle with family history. At these intersections “[a] stitch in rhyme keeps time.” Boldly intuitive, Boyle’s poetry thrums with kinetic energy while offering narratives that branch out with considerable vision.
~ Jim Johnstone, author of Infinity Network
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Art, close-work, sites of memory, and mothering: with patterned reflection and recognition, the poems of Openwork and Limestone share lyric forms that move across time and space in conversation with nature, kin, and the ancients with ceremonial care. Empathetic and insightful. Roaming, embodied, and firmly with the earth.
~ Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
Seeking Shade
The Porcupine's Quill
August 2020
ISBN-13: 9780889844353
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​My first collection of short stories
Finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award (for best debut story collection)
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"From the publisher: "A haunted mother is terrorized by spectral visions of twins. A young academic reminisces on the past, and a long-lost film, as she watches her apartment building burn. A carefree woman tears through Toronto dance halls during the second World War... Demonstrating both a skilled restraint and poetic flair, Boyle lifts her subjects from troubled, complicated lives to ask hard questions of themselves and, ultimately, be redeemed."
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This White Nest
Quattro Books
Fall 2019
ISBN-9781988254692
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"In trees illuminated against sky,
one reverse-image nest, and another
—each a distinct knot, but branch
is joined to branch. They diverge
in astonishment."
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My second collection of poetry, This White Nest continues to explore shadows and absences, the human and natural worlds while also shifting focus to other settings, employing and engaging with voices that are more archetypal and/or universal. Many of the poems touch on ghosts, memory and some grief.
Tower
Fish Gotta Swim Editions, June 1, 2018
ISBN 978-0-9780054-6-7​
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From the publisher: "The night the Mounties came, my sleep had already been disturbed by a small but insistent wail coming from the garden below my bedroom window.
There was a baby in my cabbage patch.
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And so begins the tale of Arlys, who grows vegetables and roses, and Chicory, the baby she adopts and nurtures in a farmhouse on a small coastal island. Can she keep Chicory safe forever or will the girl eventually fall in love with a damaged prince, will the carefully constructed edifice of motherhood and care survive or collapse, taking the roses down with it? Is there a happy ending for Chicory, for Torque, the edgy street artist who makes dark and beautiful murals in chalk, only to see them wash away in rain? Tower is a modern fable, an intricate tapestry of longing and danger, its pattern shifting over time and place, the tendrils ready to wrap us into its story. "
“Frances Boyle has the clear eye of a poet, along with a discerning ear for dialogue and a fine sense of story-telling. Combining these writerly qualities with careful understanding and compassion for her characters, she brings them vividly to life in this moving rendition of an old tale. Brilliant!”
- Isabel Huggan
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