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- ISBN:1-894692-18-7
- $15.95
- Poetry
- 96pp
- 2006
Emergency Contact is a sharply wrought collection of razor-edged poetry from a hot new Canadian talent. With gritty potency, Ziniuk pens her poetic landscape through emotionally volatile territories of the heart, where cities are lovers, some girls are ghosts, panic lives on street corners, and hands hold hope and a quarter.
Emergency Contact reckons with social, political and cultural violations of the body – familial dysfunction, mental illness, poverty, addiction, gender and sexual politics, and romance gone awry. Truck stops, punk shows, city streets, Shabbat candles, hospital rooms and jail cells all become secret corridors that lead beyond constellations of loss and pain into an unlimited realm of desire and possibility.
Alternately clenched fists, unflinching stares and anxious lungs pumping, these poems carve space out of unforgiving places from a transphobic smalltown America to a broken heart that won’t stop beating. Ziniuk renders a rich series of snapshots, confessions and ruminations, digging through the trenches of feeling to yield a voice that is unapologetically confrontational and infused with the fragility of vulnerability.
"This is the kind of poetry I am grateful for. My heart is pressed
up to the page reading
this."
Golda Fried, author of Nellcott is My Darling
"These are renegade missives punctuated with urgency and tension,
brokenness and letting go, magic in the shadows of the streetlights."
Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore
Editor, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity