On the very elegant surface of the Red Velvet Forest by award-winning poet, Shawna Lemay, is the author’s own journey toward deeper understanding of self and art. As with her previous collection Blue Feast, this new work is on one significant level an intensely personal journey, but on a much more profound level the Red Velvet Forest about the understanding of “personal” as a path toward the recognizing the significance of the individual in the collective survival of art and humanity. Lemay’s stunning poetry becomes the trail that must be followed back through a dark wood reminiscent of the forest that consumed Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel. The poet’s quest is to find a magic clearing in the forest she remembers from childhood where she first experienced silence in nature, but the way there is fraught with the twists and deceptions of memory.
About the Author
Shawna Lemay is the author of The Flower Can Always Be Changing (shortlisted for the 2019 Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction) and the novel Rumi and the Red Handbag, which made Harper’s Bazaar’s #THELIST. She has also written multiple books of poetry, including Red Velvet Forest, a book of essays, and the experimental novel Hive. All the God-Sized Fruit, her first book, won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Lemay lives in Edmonton.
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