Hive: a forgery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781475228106)

Shawna Lemay is the author of five books of poetry, All the God-Sized Fruit (McGill-Queen's University Press), Against Paradise (McClelland & Steward), Still (self-published), Blue Feast (NeWest Press), Red Velvet Forest (The Muses' Company), and a book of essays, Calm Things (Palimpsest Press). She has a B.A. in Honors English and and M.A. in English from the University of Alberta. All the God-Sized Fruit won both the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Calm Things was shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. She has a popular blog also called Calm Things. She lives in Edmonton with her husband, Robert Lemay, a visual artist, and their daughter. Advance Praise for Hive: A Forgery by Shawna Lemay Hive is a stunning, stinging, carefully crafted work of philosophical insight whose dazzling lyrics draw the reader in at once. With stardust on her tongue, Lemay takes us on a wondrous journey full of twists and turns in a dream-like, labyrinthine honeycomb of art, desire and interior mysteries. At every new turn, one feels like a privileged voyeur snatching bits of conversation, moments and epiphanies. Delving deep into memory and hive-like layers of meaning, gradually we are probed to question our own perception of truth. In a captivatingly haunting language, Lemay has once again created a sublime book that merits repeated exploration and contemplation. Nina Berkhout Shawna Lemay's Hive is an exquisite rendering of the intimacies of those who have been forgotten by history. It is the story of the secret lives of a line of women who strike to the centre of the masculinized world of art, choosing silence rather than fame, in the most elegant and captivating of double lives. Hive sings. It is a powerful weaving of possibilities, philosophy, romance, play, mixed with the deepest inhibitions and exhibitions a soul can undergo. Barbara Langhorst Shawna Lemay has written the book of her life. I would call this work liminal, in the best sense of that word, in that it straddles two worlds, and two ways of thinking. The artist knows she's writing beautifully, and yet there are all these parallels with fakery, forgery, and secrecy. As though it's all a big sham (house of mirrors) and the writer's flaws are certain to be exposed. That's true bravery in writing. Kimmy Beach