Emanations By Prathna Lor | The Miramichi Reader

In their debut collection Emanations, Prathna Lor flows freely and assuredly between prose poem, lyric fragment, and anaphoric list to get at, as much as language can, an explanation of self, “an incomplete fabrication / moved by a pronoun.”

To accomplish this through words, according to Lor, is to “assemble all the names I inherit,” “to unspeak a history,” and to “voice / Not as betrayal / As luminescence.” Yet even as Lor categorizes, they simultaneously admit to a fiction of categories: “what presents itself as itself must always be undone.”

One way it is “undone” within the poems is by assigning new terms “carved from misgivings.” Another way it is “undone” is via the use of rhetorical devices such as repetition and anaphora. Repeated anaphoric phrases such as “I am bound because ignorance makes me sick” and “Dangerous thinking” serve to bring to the fore the dual attentions of Lor’s poems.

The way repetition “dilates what is given to speech” and also mirrors “the register of prayer.” With “discordia on the tongue” and a “little biding underneath,” Lor writes, “hollowing my references” to discover “what is left between / accident and epiphany.” Ultimately in their poems, Lor seems to be in pursuit of “living, finally” in “the everyday divine.” And, reader, we share “a moment of recovery / to listen extraordinarily” to Pratha Lor’s Emanantions.

Prathna Lor is a poet, essayist, editor and educator, who has published in Canadian Literature, DIAGRAM, C Magazine, Jacket2, Poetry is Dead and Plenitude Magazine, among others. Lor is Poetry Editor at Shrapnel Magazine and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. They live in Montreal, QC.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Buckrider Books (April 26 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 72 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1989496490
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1989496497

Jami Macarty

Jami Macarty gratefully recognizes the Coast Salish as the traditional and rightful owners of lands where Jami has the privilege to live and learn—as a teacher at Simon Fraser University, as an independent editor, and as a writer of essays, reviews, and poetry. Jami is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award - Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by the British Columbia Arts Council, the Writer’s Studio at Banff Centre, and by editors at Canadian magazines such as Arc Poetry Magazine, The Capilano Review, CV2, EVENT, Grain, and Vallum Magazine.