The much-anticipated second collection from Gerald Lampert Memorial Award–winning poet Kayla Czaga, Dunk Tank is a rich, imaginative, and sometimes absurdist exploration of the landscape of the body and of adult life.
In the title poem of Kayla Czaga’s sophomore collection, a teenage speaker is suspended between knowledge and experience, confidently hovering before the world plunges her into adult life. Dunk Tank reimagines the body as a strange and unknowable landscape: full of cancers that “burst like blackberries,” a butt that could run for prime minister of Canada, and the underworld lurking in Winona Ryder’s pores. Clouds become testicles and uteri turn into goldfish, flickering and fragile, but still ultimately glowing. These poems explore the varied and strange relationships that underpin a young woman’s coming of age, from inconsequential boyfriends to the friendships that rescue us from “grey daily moments.” Unsure of how the world works and her part in it, Czaga forges a landscape of metaphor and gleaming, dense imagery. Dunk Tank is playful and dark, comic and disturbing.
The much-anticipated second collection from Gerald Lampert Memorial Award–winning poet Kayla Czaga, Dunk Tank is a rich, imaginative, and sometimes absurdist exploration of the landscape of the body and of adult life.
In the title poem of Kayla Czaga’s sophomore collection, a teenage speaker is suspended between knowledge and experience, confidently hovering before the world plunges her into adult life. Dunk Tank reimagines the body as a strange and unknowable landscape: full of cancers that “burst like blackberries,” a butt that could run for prime minister of Canada, and the underworld lurking in Winona Ryder’s pores. Clouds become testicles and uteri turn into goldfish, flickering and fragile, but still ultimately glowing. These poems explore the varied and strange relationships that underpin a young woman’s coming of age, from inconsequential boyfriends to the friendships that rescue us from “grey daily moments.” Unsure of how the world works and her part in it, Czaga forges a landscape of metaphor and gleaming, dense imagery. Dunk Tank is playful and dark, comic and disturbing.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Apr 9, 2019 |
| Specifications | 96 pages | 5.5 in x 8.5 in |
| Keywords | coming of age; diary of growing up; absurd; maturation; folly of youth; surrealism; dark; accessible poetry; dark; comic; disturbing; thunderpants; body horror; dense imagery; small town; boredom; canlit; women writers; women's literature; Finalist; Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; A CBC Book of the Year; Erin Moure; Paul Versmeech; |
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
KAYLA CZAGA is the author of two previous poetry collections—For Your Safety Please Hold On, and Dunk Tank. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Frequently anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry series, her writing also appears in The Walrus, Grain, Event, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, also known as the Esquimalt and Songhees nations (Victoria BC). |
| Written By |
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KAYLA CZAGA is the author of two previous poetry collections—For Your Safety Please Hold On, and Dunk Tank. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Frequently anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry series, her writing also appears in The Walrus, Grain, Event, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, also known as the Esquimalt and Songhees nations (Victoria BC). |
Runner-up, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, 2019
Commended, A CBC Book of the Year, 2019
“These poems of love, service-industry jobs, and small-town boredom . . . buzz with fierce restlessness and longing.” —Toronto Star
“Dunk Tank trades in specificity, intimacy, weirdness, colloquialism, and dark humour.” —Globe and Mail
“Czaga manages to capture moments of maturation with the wisdom of a backward glance . . . Approachable and skillful in its poetics and narrative detail.” —Quill and Quire
“The author is always inventive in her metaphors and images … All in all Dunk Tank is smart and heartfelt.” —Walleye
“Reading Kayla Czaga’s Dunk Tank is like taking a ride in a hot-wired car from Kitimat, seeing how far it will take you … Czaga creates order from disparate-seeming imagery with an intuitive knack for repetition … Good poetry resonates on different levels, leaves you thinking about your own life for some time beyond. And in this regard Czaga’s poems leave you laugh-crying and changed.” —Ormsby Review
“Seemingly effortless but brimming with craft, Czaga’s art results from her enviable agility with phrasing and expression. The poems in Dunk Tank are as immediate, honest, affectionate, raw, anxious, jokey, and thoughtful as an impromptu confession over an evening’s confab. Sparkling with recollection’s rich details, associative leaps, colloquial doses of energy and imaginative reach, Dunk Tank is exhilarating.” —David O’Meara, author of A Pretty Sight
“What a profound, effortless spell Kayla Czaga conjures with this collection. In communion with an array of private and public selves, these poems convince me authentic connection is possible. Desirous and impulsive, problematic as any one of us, the speaker never exempts herself from the world she tallies in tacos, panties, inherited stress, taps on Instagram posts, seagulls heaped like Kleenex. When she confesses ‘it felt / like we could say and finally mean / something,’ I’m enlivened, senses heightened, as if my name is being called by someone who never calls me by my name.” —Sheryda Warrener, author of Floating Is Everything