Full Moon of Afraid and Craving

Melanie Power

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228013396
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

A hometown is a data centre / where the past is stored

From a darkly humorous perspective, this book charts a young person's navigation of narrow definitions of faith, femininity, and family.

Confronting addiction, compulsions, and anxieties, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving explores the strange combination of wonder and longing that makes a life. Across settings rural and urban, Melanie Power's poems commemorate ordinary moments and everyday characters: a roadside shopkeeper, a neighbourhood linden tree, a great-uncle's hooch. Interrogating lineage and inheritance, she traces the unsettling shadows that border joy. A series of ambivalent odes pay a winking, Proustian homage to the sense memories of a Roman Catholic millennial upbringing in Newfoundland. The long poem "The Fever and the Fret," written during pandemic lockdown in Montreal, considers how we re-examine and consolidate our personal and civic pasts in times of crisis, drawing timely parallels to John Keats's confinement due to illness exactly two centuries prior.

At times wry and lighthearted, at others elegiac and plaintive, the voices in these poems are controlled and confident. Just as the stars in the sky are best viewed at night, this collection embraces darkness to illuminate rays of moonlight.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ODE TO MCCAIN’S DEEP’N DELICIOUS CAKE
• THE REAL PLEIADES
• YOUR PAST SELVES ATTEND YOUR BIRTHDAY PARTY
• BASEL PENPAL
• ODE TO GREAT-UNCLE WILL’S SHINE
• LIGHT OF A FRACTURED MOON
• AFTER APPLE-PICKING
• IF YOU ANSWER YES TO ANY OF THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS
• ELEGY TO 17
• AFTER MIDNIGHT
• ODE TO THE ½ MOON
• ANTIGONISH AT DAWN
• IT HURT TO BE NOWHERE
• MAGIC SHOW
• I SHOULD HAVE GUESSED
• NAMES LIKE QUARTZ IN THE MOUTH
• HARVEST
• PICKING SEASON
• ACROSS THE MARSHES
• ARCHIPELAGO
• ODE TO TUNNOCK’S CARAMEL LOG
• FROST IN OCTOBER
• ROMAN AUBADE
• ODE TO SLEEP
• SFOGLIATELLA
• ELEGY FOR THE LINDEN TREE
• ICEBERG IN FERRYLAND
• POWER’S STORE
• MY FATHER’S FATHER
• I HAVE NOT ALWAYS BEEN AS CAREFUL AS I AM NOW
• THE FEVER AND THE FRET
• I. Rue Garnier
• II. Avenue Querbes
• III. Avenue St-Marc
• IV. Rue Clark
• V. Rue Saint-Dominique
• VI. Avenue de Normanville
• I COME HOME TO REMEMBER WHY I HAVE TO LEAVE AGAIN
• SHAAR HASHOMAYIM CEMETERY
• ANDROMEDA
• THE STONE
• PURPLE BALLOONS
• NOTES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS