Science Fiction Saint
by Nancy Jo Cullen
Science Fiction Saint, by playwright and poet Nancy Jo Cullen, investigates the space between a more traditional lyric line and the experimental use of form and language. A provocative work that shimmers with risk and offbeat humour.
- Short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry
- Short-listed for the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Steffanson award for poetry
- Short-listed for the Book Publishers Association of Alberta's Best Trade Book award
$15.95 CAD
Additional information
| Weight | .134 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 8.5 × 5.5 × .25 in |
| Page Count | 88 |
| Binding | Soft Cover |
| Year Published | 2002 |
Nancy Jo Cullen
Nancy Jo Cullen is a playwright, poet and fiction writer. Her plays The Waitresses (co-written with Anne Loree), Forever There and Gone Tomorrow (co-written with Rose Scollard) and Another Saturday Night have all been produced by Maenad Theatre in Calgary, of which she was a co-founder. She has published three poetry books with poetry books with Frontenac House: Science Fiction Saint which was shortlisted for three awards: Best Alberta Trade book, Best Alberta Poetry Book and The Gerald Lampert Award; Pearl (which won the Best Alberta Trade Book award) and Untitled Child.
She is a graduate of the University of Guelph Humber MFA program and is the 4th recipient of the Wrtiers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writer. Her fiction has appeared in The Puritan, Grain, filling station, Plenitude, Prairie Fire and This Magazine. Two of her short stories were included in The Journey Prize Anthology, in 2012 and in 2014. Her short story collection, Canary, is the winner of the 2012 Metcalf Rooke Award. Canary published by Biblioasis in 2013 was highly acclaimed by reviewers across Canada.
She is at work on a novel and another collection of short stories.
Testimonials
The poet has a real gift for juxtaposition, setting different language registers against one another, punning, and generally torquing up the language of the quotidian in interesting and unexpected ways… The leaps are adept, exciting, and often amusing, even, occasionally, breath-taking.
~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Cullen gives us front row seats at what Seigfried Sassoon called “the great theatre of the self”. Her work is a series of turns and pirouettes, leaping from childhood trauma, to sexual exploration, to the divine, to the possibilities of loving with one’s imagination, and back again, all without missing a beat.
~Alexander Rettie, Alberta Views
There’s a questing and multidimensional mind at work as the poems explore a real mix of subjects, from surviving girlhood to working in the small-town tourism industry to seduction.
~Harry Vandervlist, FFWD
Though an account of sainthood in other than the usual settings, Science Fiction Saint is still a story of triumph over the hells created for us in the violence and expectations of others. In both form and content, Cullen’s poetry is a sassy, assertive attack, irreverent in the way that all who question tradition remind us what it is to be human and strike out at what holds us back.
~Alberta Book Awards Jury
Just under each of these poems, invisibly audible, runs a camouflage of song. We can hear the words of heaven and hell, of the rites of passage, of sexuality, but what we really listen to is the song. Nancy Cullen uses her attentive and tuned ear to not only explore the obvious content of one’s own living but to literally tune into the hum behind the thought. These poems are what the imagination sounds like, the harmony of noise, those “chunks of whatever wasn’t vacuumed” after the confession.
~Fred Wah
Science Fiction Saint is a tightly woven collection of poetry filled with dynamic imagery. In its immediacy, the oral tradition meets the page in a playful celebration of life in the twenty first century. The reader is propelled between the lyrical and post-modern line as Nancy Jo Cullen speaks of a woman’s journey that questions, “What is holy?” all the time debunking myths that limit the possibilities of spirit. This first collection rockets.
~Sheri-D Wilson