Okay, little torch. It’s time
I got to work once more.
Hitching my constellation
of allusions to you.
Stedfast
Goose Lane Editions icehouse poetry (2023)
Breaking the fourteen lines of Keats’s sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” into a sequence of twenty-eight titles, Ali Blythe writes marginality into the canon, at once claiming, reviving, and un-fixing the Romantic vision.
Taking place over one night, the poet in bed next to a sleeping lover, Blythe’s revelatory poems struggle with questions of illusion and reality, immersion and escapism, that which endures and that which is transient.
Victoria Book Prize Finalist
Raymond Souster Award Longlist
Fred Cogswell Award Longlist
Stedfast is a slow burn that leaves a mark
The British Columbia Review
Praise
these moving love poems write into the Romantic tradition, making and re-making it for the modern world
The Winnipeg Free Press
a milestone of creativity and craft....it’s just bursting into the constellations
Pique Magazine
About Ali Blythe
Ali Blythe is author of critically acclaimed poetry collections exploring trans-poetics.
Blythe’s poems and essays are published in national and international literary journals and anthologies, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature, Best Canadian Essays and Best Canadian Poetry.
Blythe has held roles as a guest editor for special editions of literary magazines including for The League of Canadian Poets, Arc Magazine and Malahat Review, and as editor-in-chief for the Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for youth.
He is a recent graduand of Royal Roads University, where his master of arts research examined artist- and writer-in-residence programs across Canadian universities.