Rags of Night in Our Mouths

Rags of Night in Our Mouths is a poetry collection that explores the human and environmental states of precarity and vulnerability. It draws upon the family's deep roots in the Tantramar Marsh area and constructs a hallucinatory world of fragility, chaos, and searing natural beauty. The focus moves from an absent beloved to the teeming, non-human world of an endangered saltmarsh, and the closing suite honors a landscape slated to be destroyed and pays homage to those who walk the ragged shoreline, struggling to make sense of losses and death.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 80 pages
Publication date: 05 April 2022
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

Margo Wheaton stood in the middle of her childhood home, struck by two things: the extent of the damage caused by her father's and stepmother's alcoholism, and the life force that pulsed in the once-vibrant rooms and yard. The abandoned trees, neglected flowerbeds, and gardens her parents had planted and tended for decades were a testament to their dedication.

Rags of Night in Our Mouths is a powerful exploration of human and environmental states of precarity and vulnerability. In the opening suite, Wheaton draws upon her family's deep roots in the Tantramar Marsh area and constructs a hallucinatory world of fragility, chaos, and searing natural beauty. She writes her own version of Maritime gothic, surveying the ruins of her working-class childhood home, a thriving place now ravaged by generational alcoholism and despair.

The focus of the book then moves to the teeming, non-human world of an endangered saltmarsh on a wild shore of the Northumberland Strait bordering Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. In the closing suite, Wheaton honours a landscape slated to be destroyed and pays homage to "the broken-hearted, the bereaved" who walk the ragged shoreline, struggling to make sense of losses and death.

Rags of Night in Our Mouths is a meditative and beautifully crafted book that calls us to engage passionately with our suffering world. It is a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of caring for our planet and its inhabitants.

Dimension: 191 x 127 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780228011163