Julie Joosten
Julie Joosten
Biography
Julie Joosten’s first book, Light Light, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Goldie Award. Her second book, Nought, was published in 2020. Julie lives with her family in Tkaranto on the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
Sample of Poet's Work
Nest
Love, of sometimes solitude—
the else wheres to which it passes—
a season of small fruits, a flood, a road
without balm—the where where my senses
unfold, entangling.
I’m trying to find a space big enough
for all our organs.
Touching the nerves’ equivocal, I listen
to a moth’s wings, near then far away,
murmuring, murmuring—an anterior abandoned
with the gravity of evanescence,
the ways of becoming what love will
have been.
Thought clattered
into the rhythm of
rest, the duration of a breath
my hands turn
into forgery,
forcing
a there, where
solitude stands in the shape
of what once fell
like a shadow.
While slept the sun, having
arrived or
not, spectacularly silken.
*
She walks across a field to
thinking how thinking
accompanies life. Lavender caves, an
abundance of loss. Wondering if
thought is also an affair
of the skin. Cowbells, cowbells,
cowbells. Her memory blushes pink.
A partial eclipse, the sun visible
like a quarter moon. Her skin trembles
the little weights and textures of gone
things. A nation of birds, some
clouds. The future arrives before
she recognizes it. A future thick as fur.
*
(to touch the mind spreading across
a distance called your skin, indelicate index
of my fingers’ incursion into the future
tense of spring.
If I could gather the folds of your
memory, I would take your face in my
hands, your hands in my mouth, take
your night to the marrow of water’s
surface, starred thought hanging
suspended from skies blue with cold.
Morning light enters our pores,
measures time as the vibration of snow
fall, returns to the sky glowing warm from our
blood, light having become a thought
conceived by the skin.
We might have touched here, force
coming briefly to form, the cold wind
stinging my lungs
in your chest.)
*
Air abdicated from the wind
blows open our door, admits nothing—
my eyes light on the doorknob, fall
into faint fingerprint lines,
live there, the brain extending into
the world as the murmur of the eyes
becoming touch becomes perceptible.
Touch, having gained dimension, displaces
the sky: tumbled clouds, humming,
sticky sun, fumbling—
I’m trying to write you the whole
body—the brain touching itself and
attaching us to life, the curve at
the edge of hearing, the netting
nerve and thought girding the stomach—
—this “this” (beat, beat) almost unseen.
, touch
What’s known as entry, tunnelling into
life, becoming alive, becoming more
alive, what’s more or less alive
Unsuckled cells cluster to my
surrendering—surrender, that ephemeral
noun of longing—among rage’s
respiration
I’m trying to set aside the idea
of muscles and think of surrender
as a freedom to fluoresce
the first three body parts I read are
eyelid
follicle
throat
Digesting in flashes, I practise talking
on the tip of quiet, strange coordinates
of numbness and chewing and waiting and
death in fatty little globules
(yesterday on the street someone was
selling dead magnolia leaves cracked
and tied in bundles—to my fingers,
their undersides still still like moss)
as my hormones drift like pollen,
collecting in gauzy layers on mailboxes
and sidewalks and windshields
My womb
engulfs the moon’s
biochemical dissolution—
nightfall circles
disequilibrium
solace
snow
as my last receptor of darkness
senses night cordoning its
severe law
The pineal gland cones its future seed,
sediments my dreams until whatever’s
luminous invasion (my sleep hasn’t been
my own since I was fifteen)
I want to kiss your naked back
I’m looking for hormones and the names
of my organs in other languages—
the album on repeat, warming in front
of the fire, I’m looking for all
the sentences that include bodies and
body parts and chemicals the body
makes and responds to
I’m drinking cherry juice and eating
violets as I oil through this
clothing, the fabric catching the sky
that might have become you
Wrought radiant gesture, your touch is
a gift incubating electricity—
inner and myriad elegance changing its
vantage, a quotidian thread tethered to
life, meandering and indentured to light,
the way words are a conduit of violence,
of love
occurs in a sensation: anarchy—
things existing before they come to be
a filament of light
An ecology of intensities. Chlorophyll confers the faculty of feeding
on light. Hair-breadths of light dangle deliciously, open resilient
margins of attention. The miniscule trembles. Absorption and loss
are labor. This is a tacit intimacy, an energetic discordance
of vibrating cells. The sun hangs before color, energy tied up.
From “Light Fragments” in Light, Light (Book Thug, 2013)