Lot 23 by Tonya Lailey (Gaspereau Press, 2024)
Yet another gorgeous Gaspereau book with textured cover stock, a stark lithograph, an exquisite font. All that Tonya Lailey's moving poems deserve as they seek to enter the memory of a farm, a vineyard, a time of parental labour, immigrant workers, the rise and fall of crops over the course of decades in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I don't, as a rule, review first books of poetry here on Brilliant Women Inc, but I am making an exception for Lot 23 as I have now read it twice with much pleasure and have invited Lailey to read at my Impromptu series for traveling poets this June. Lot 23 is divided into four segments like plowed fields: "Concessions," an introduction of the book's themes, "Lines," attending more to farming and including several descriptive listing pieces on owned vehicles and familiar roads, "End Posts," which enlarges this subject matter, reaching back to her grandparents and to a list of creatures who died on an...