Michael Trussler Reads from The History Forest
Join us for a poetry break – courtesy of a reading by Michael Trussler, from his 2022 collection The History Forest.
AS UNNOTICED AS POSSIBLE
for Lucy, our first mother
There’s almost always two of them:
mother and (or mother with)
her child up against
a tilting shoulder, a breast
about to tire
and four
separate hands, each gathering
its own task, each finger an annunciation
of trust. Care. And this particular pair, an almost
young Australopithecus looking faraway down
into the distance yet beneath and between us, her
offspring, a toddler mesmerized by something
looming behind what’s already here,
this ancestral pair—the colour
of sun tape over shadow—
its factory-made plastic, is
conjured
from the gasoline haze
above the playground in
the toy city, an unforeseen cosmopolis done in
by polymers, some in the neonatal
intensive care unit, and others inside
our luminous and ever-improving toothpaste. River
run, an infinite
A vivid, sensory collection of poems from an award-winning author.
Poet Michael Trussler grapples with the intricate beauty of the natural world and the imminent danger of its destruction in The History Forest.
By exploring what it means to be alive in this increasingly contradictory and frightening era in human history, Trussler’s vivid, sensory, and surreal poems dwell on the myriad ways that wonder can exist alongside suffering. He ruminates on nuclear war, school shootings, and ecological destruction, along with his own experiences with mental health, aging, and loss.
Michael Trussler writes poetry, short stories, and creative non-fiction - his work often engages with the beauty and violence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based in Regina, Trussler’s previous works include The Sunday Book, Encounters (Sask Book of the Year, City of Regina Award), and Accidental Animals.
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