Forthcoming Release Fall 2021
Frontenac House 

Our Bodies' Unanswered Questions

Poems that explore the body’s unanswered questions of aging and mortality, its desires and defeats. The body In community, in friendship, as citizen, as witness. The body In myth and history, as repository of memory: What are Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions? 

    Drawing: Amari Donawa, 9                 Photo: Chris Hancock Donaldson

__________________________________________________________
Thin Air of the Knowable
Brick Books 2017 
​_______________________________________________

“Wendy Donawa’s Thin Air of the Knowable is a rigorous questioning of time–how we perceive it, how we contain it and how we live it. She turns to the artifacts of private and collective experience to craft springboards for her exploration of nostalgia and desire. Her flexing, shifting verse gives us contemporaneity in ancient discovery, “[s]mall beauties“ on the ”demonic journey”, intimacy in strangeness and the endurance of ephemeral moments in memory and story.”
      (Jury for 2018 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award)

"A delicate & very successful expression of the inexpressible beauty of any living moment."
      Longlist, the Raymond Souster Award

"A noteworthy aspect of Thin Air of the Knowable is Donawa’s concern with issues of imperial contact, particularly the history of slavery in the Caribbean….  In another poem, Donawa’s speaker reflects on her own strange (i.e., not neutral) whiteness: “I knew this place, comfort amid discomfort, / though sometimes saw my pale face in shop windows / . . . history’s sins stamped on my forehead.” ... Donawa’s awareness that the material effects of imperialism do not vanish but remain, embodied, links her contact poems to her poems of personal loss and grief."
                  (Canadian Review of Literature)
​
 
​REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS of The Thin Air of the Knowable

Interview with Nancy Jane Bullis @ HOWL@CUIT89.5 FM, Toronto 

https://49thshelf.com/Books/T/Thin-Air-of-the-Knowable

http://open-book.ca/News/Five-Things-Literary-Victoria-BC-with-Wendy-Donawa  

https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2017/This-Week-in-Lit-Events-April-10-16th

http://rollofnickels.blogspot.ca/2017/04/bc-poety-2017-thin-air-of-knowable-by.html

             “Wendy Donawa’s poetry rests at the very edge of beauty where a wild delicacy resides.”  
                    PATRICK LANE

             “Like the watchmakers of old, Wendy Donawa puts a spyglass to her eye and fixes her
              vision to the minute, to all that carries on beneath our imperfect sight—worlds upon
​              worlds brought into the sharpest focus.”
                    PAMELA PORTER

_____________________________________________________
                 Chapbooks                
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

​2016   The Gorge: A Cartography of Sorrows. With book designer Terry Ann Carter.  Saskatoon, SK: JackPine Press.

2012    Those Astonishments of Sorrow, of Joy. Lantzville, BC: Leaf Press. 

2009    Sliding towards Equinox. Edmonton, AB: Rubicon Press.

---