Joanne Arnott’s Halfling Spring: An Internet Romance (Kegedonce Press) is a book of poetry with accompanying imagery of charcoal and ink sketches from award winning artist Leo Yerxa.
Halfling Spring explores themes of intimate relationships, the electronic age, globalization, and traditional life. Arnott’s poetry delves into the desire for connection in the era of mass communication. The works include intimate musings and risking vulnerability for love, as well as finding meaning within the over-saturation of information.
With complex prose, Arnott expresses compelling depth in soulful reflections. Drifting from realism—with poems like ‘a cure for longevity’ about “an email missive…of cinnamon and honey would cure ailments”— into a dreamy ethereal landscape of metaphor and allusion, such as ‘uses of the erotic (the erotic as power) with thanks to Audre Lourde’—“the star is a healing dancer too, with water she slakes every thirst, even those you never knew you had”.
Joanne Arnott is an award winning Métis/mixed blood writer from Manitoba. Born in 1960, in Winnipeg, she studied at the University of Windsor, in Ontario. She has lived on the West Coast since 1982.
Her first book of poetry, Wiles of Girlhood won the Gerald Lampert Award in 1992. Other books include: My Grass Cradle, Breasting the Waves: On Writing & Healing, and the children’s book, Ma MacDonald. She has performed readings of her work and given writing workshops across Canada and in Australia. Halfling Spring: An Internet Romance (ISBN-13: 978 – 0 – 9868740 – 6 – 2) can be ordered online through Kegedonce Press.