Price: $14.99
Page Count: 114
Publication Date: October 2012
ISBN: 978-1-927335-11-6
The person who leaves an unlivable family and sets off on a difficult course far from being a family traitor is the one who in the end preserves the good family name and the honour of more noble ancestors who knew how to love children properly sustain a full family tree –from “Noble Orphan”
Noble Orphan explores several related themes and issues: immigration, ESL teaching and cross-cultural mothering; traditional mothering and fathering; the social constructions of masculinity and femininity; violence in gender relations; child abuse and the lack of commu- nal responsibility for child welfare; home and homelessness; mental health and psychiatry; trauma and healing; female friendship and community; ecofeminist spirituality; and animal and environmental protection. Like her first poetry book Welcoming (Inanna Press), Noble Orphan is a reflective collection that challenges destructive values while promoting ecofeminist ones, a cooperative, ecologically sustainable world with “beehive love ”(from “Beehive Love”). It spans a wide range of emotions: there is empowered anger—words that “catch on fire” (from “Fire-Eater”)—but also care, compassion, and gentlessness—“the light touch of the dragonfly” (from “One-YearOld Girl”). The creative use of language and beautiful simplicity of many of the poems enables the reader to enter the writing with ease.
Preface
Teaching esl
Sea Accent
Pronunciation
Crescent Moon
Teaching esl
Yellow Plastic Case
Chinese Mothers
Chang’e
Chinese Friend
Beehive Love
Teaching Children
Young Sappho
Fifteen-Year-Old Girl
Young Nature Goddess
Rectangle
Father
Airplane
Pink Girl
One-Year-Old Girl
Young Nature God
Saint Halloween
Private Tutor
Mother’s Day
Worker Bee 30
Homeless Neighbour
homeless neighbour
Stee-people
Animal Bite
Synchronicity
99 Express Bus
Endangered
Radio Broadcaster
pilgrimage to burns bog
River
Siamese Cat
Feline Love
Trouba’s Kitten Book
to my less furr-urr-y friends
Noble Orphan
Hospital Birth Record
Astrological Natal Chart
Alignment
Anti-Hopscotches
Mood Lenses
Psychiatric Protocol
Foot Poems
Grey Mood
Co-Dependent Marriage
Moths
Blue Eyes
Cousins
Father Sex Crimes
Fire-Eater
hurricane thomas: a traumatic re-enactment
Vagina Dentata
prayer for incest survivors
rage
red dragonfly
Matron Saint of Valentine’s Day
Twins
Noble Orphan
On Reviving Socrates
President’s Inauguration: The Man
Mother’s Day
A Bouquet for My Mother from Vandussen Garden
Mary Daly
portable shrine
Sufi Heat Rose
sufi heat rose
male alto
man who loves the lute
harpsichord
mandala
Acknowledgments
Andrea Nicki was born and grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Queen’s University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Bioethics at the Univer- sity of Minnesota. She is Faculty Lecturer in narrative medicine and applied health ethics in the Department of Health Science at Simon Fraser University. Her poems have appeared or are forth- coming in Canadian and international journals and anthologies such as The Brock Review, Rampike, The Goose, Philosophy Now, Mag- nolia: A Journal of Women’s Literature II, Women Write Their Bod- ies: Stories of Illness and Healing, My Body, My Health: Women’s Stories, Different Art: An Anthology on Disability and Arts, Women and Environments International, and She is Everywhere: Volume 3.
