Oyama Pink Shale

Governor General’s Literary award finalist Sharon Thesen’s latest poetry collection, Oyama Pink Shale, is a sly, self-directed, discrete yet joyously emancipatory work. By animating and voicing various moments and selves — childhood masques, indebted adult friend to artists, cold documentarian of a haunted sanitarium, among others — Thesen’s poems show the transience of the earthly moment while convincing us of the thread of spirit that links all our lost bits and makes them possible. There’s an uncontainable buoyancy and lift in the lines and quick-shifting frames, as they swerve toward the darker, more gravid complexities of contemporary life. Oyama Pink Shale exhibits a love for the quotidian, for the oblique angle and a singular talent for the music of cumulative wonder. Writing at the peak of her powers, Thesen gives us her best work yet.