Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice

sublime (adjective) of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe. sublime (verb) (Chemistry): (Of a solid substance) to change directly into vapor when heated, typically forming a solid deposit again on cooling. In Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice, poets from across Turtle Island explore what it means to enter into conversation with ice. The poems in Yvonne Blomer’s third, water-focused anthology exemplify sublime as both verb and adjective: these are poems that skate, drink, stomp, crush and dive. In poems that range from street hockey, to snow angels, to meltwater, poets write to the ever-changing ways of ice. Other poems grapple with fires that melt permafrost and rising temperatures that fracture and erode lives. In the poems, fissures form into ever-expanding crevasses, and animals suffer because of humanity’s negative impact on Earth’s most ancient of water systems: ice. Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice features poems by Governor General Award winners, Poet Laureates in cities across Canada, and other important voices for our time and place in history. Contributors include John Barton, Gary Barwin, Marilyn Bowering, Elizabeth Bradfield, Kate Braid, Terry Ann Carter, Trevor Carolan, Dymphny Dronyk, Karen Enns, Katia Grubisic, Penn Kemp, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Anita Lahey, Evelyn Lau, Joanna Lilley, Annick MacAskill, David Martin, Micheline Maylor, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Catherine Owen, Arleen Pare, Troy Sebastian, Bren Simmers, Rob Taylor, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Tom Wayman, and many, many more.

Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). Blomer served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015 to 2018. Through poetry, she has raised awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology. She is the creator and editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017), the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed by Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). She was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁ NEC (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.