Mongrel Love
by Judith Krause
Paperback (Poetry)
8.5" x 5.25" · 112 pages
Release Date: April 2008
ISBN 9780978344016
Judith Krause is well known for her sharp perceptions, skill and wit, and in Mongrel Love she brings together all these elements in her best work to date. These poems are infused with a generous spirit for dogs, birds and other animals as well as humans and their artifacts. In many ways these are poems that travel, from the easy-chair to the fabled streets of Paris and through Krause's voice and vision we arrive with new insights and a new understanding of the journey. Here is the assured voice and constant music of a mature poet, one who doesn't shy away from the enduring subjects: the living, the dead, and the human events that move us through our time.
“Presided over by the spirit of Emily Dickinson, Judith Krause’s poems embrace an intense minimalism, but they don’t stop there. Krause honours life, flawed as it is, in all forms; as she writes in the title poem, “We are all wounded/& beautiful/in our white cotton gauze/squares and strips.” There is a subtle, yet rich, lyric architecture in these poems that house past loves, present loves, memory, and the “favourite rooms” of the heart. These poems are rooms I will return to and inhabit many times.”
photo credit: Don Hall
Judith Krause
Judith Krause is a Regina writer, editor and teacher whose work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as a BA and BEd from the University of Regina. She has edited a number of poetry collections and co-edited the anthology Out of Place with Ven Begamudre. Her earlier publications include four poetry collections: What We Bring Home (1986), Half the Sky (1994), Silk Routes of the Body (2001), and Mongrel Love (2008) and a collaborative chapbook, blue transport/ the insistence of green (2007). Krause is a two-time recipient of the City of Regina Writing Award, co-winner of the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and has been awarded residencies and fellowships in the U.S. She is currently serving as the Saskatchewan Poet Laureate.
