Nought

Julie Joosten

• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781771665896
• eBook ISBN: 9781771665902
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Finalist for the 2021 Nelson Ball Prize

Nought, the new poetry collection by Governor General's Literary Award finalist Julie Joosten, explores the intersections of body, identity, and love in poems that grapple with mysteries of neurology and metaphysics. Here the materiality of the body and experience have transformed into a language, a thought that resides in and between bodies. Throughout, Joosten masterfully engages with form and rhythm, crafting work that is intimage and perceptive, pulsing with life.

Love Poem

The only thing I needed was blue, and you sent me an email of blues.

And each time you return, I feel like a golden retriever peeing on the floor.

I constantly bounce you up and down and you sleep bouncing in my arms.

And even though I adore you, it takes me forever to respond to your texts.

You told me I had an art, told me to hold myself together for the sake of my art.

And we silently watched the clouds while drinking green tea, forgetting why we were sitting together at all, I think.

And I read your note in the library and wept nineteenth-century tears.

And I drank so much after you died that I had to fall asleep in the hotel during the bereavement lunch in the church basement.

The tips of my fingers reach for a word and your hand.

You brought me a tin of violet.

And I thought I’d write you about the soul because I’ve already written you about the brain.

When I say something that moves you, something that would make me cry, you say, ohhhh, a long exhalation, involuntary.

I wonder if you know you do this.

And I cup-feed you.

And you make me tea.

And I will be your earthly matchmaker.

Beyond my mind, yours.

And you bark then bite my ass when I turn my back to you.

And you said it feels like falling in love.

And you asked me to forgive you.

And when you laugh you go, tse tse tse.

We talked about a prone and speechless dialect, a gestural language.

And your fingers stroke my palm.

After the year of the strawberry, you walked with me into the year of the grape.

And we trace the edges of the Great Lakes with our tongues, watch Superior spin and Ontario sway in eastern light.

And you taught me the craft of my own thought.

And introduced me to the phrase a bouquet of yous.

There is a wild love between two women.

And you really love talking on the phone.

And you invented a whistle for me that has become part of your private language with the dogs.

And you recounted in great detail the story of Psyche and Errol.

And I pressure you to tell me how good the gard...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Nest
• Necklace
• Swoon Revolt
• On Nothing
• For Nor
• Love Poem
• “Of Ground, or Air, or Ought”
• Dear Friend
• Second-hand
• , touch
• Silence, an Index
• [whose hair is yellower than torchlight]
• On Anemones
• This, Seeded in a Glance
• An Opening
• Endnotes
• Notes and Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Colophon