serpent (w)rite: (a reader’s gloss)

Likely the first book-length mash-up narrative in Canada, this poetic narrative encounters the opening chapters of Genesis. The writer begins by getting lost in the woods of Northern Ontario: “willing to be lost/a will to be lost/accept our condition/ give up the Garden…confronted with how lost we are narrative begins/(our resolve) to make this place home.” She scents her way through the sentence, the word as code, gradually recognizes reading as survival, for she is in search of a different Eve who re-fuses Garden Grammar. Glossing beyond the singular voice of author-I-ty, she theorizes her way out of the wood (be) tyranny of Truth, singular. As she seeks to release herself from her conservative upbringing, she turns to etymologies’ mistranslated meanings, and is in “conversations” (via quotes) with over 50 scholars of the bible, other spiritual texts, ancient myth, evolving feminist, postmodern and structuralist thinking. Herizons commented that Warland’s “poetry is marked by a brilliance and originality similar to the writings of language reformers such as Gertrude Stein.”

 1987 Coach House Press