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- ISBN: 1-894692-04-7
- $16.95
- Poetry/First Nation
- 120pp
- 2002
In this caustic and powerful creation poem, the "old lady" sings the world into being in dust and grass. Retold by the auntys of the title, what the auntys say is serial poetry with wit as dry and humour as rich as the land that bred it. Stirring magic into the mundane, Sharron Proulx-Turner bleeds elegy through the colloquial, fusing history, soil and Alberta farmland into a dense, fluid neo-epic. Language soars. what the auntys say is the culmination of years of rumination on roots and the power of language.
Shortlisted for the 2003 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry
"Compelling and relentless in its rhythms, Proulx-Turner mingles delight and humour and tangles them with anger, though even in anger, rhythm and a winked eye predominate. It's beautiful in its forms and whole, drives out fear, is full of elation and vigour, funny, smart and gentle, with a lovely use of refrains and a historical consciousness. The old lady trickster is wonderful."
Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Judges
"What Sharron Proulx-Turner does with English must be what the Métis did to create themselves. what the auntys say is renewed storytelling, emotional, thoughtful, musical, humourous poetry. Mixing fable, autobiography, polemic and visions, her language is rich and trickstery, arriving in moments quotidian, then eternal, then horrific, then beautiful, a vivid voicing that rings and echoes. That human metissage is her message."
Daniel David Moses