What’s Happening

Roewan Crowe’s debut long poem Quivering Land, wrangles up violence and trauma in the lasso of a queer Western. Juxtaposed with visual artist Paul Robles’ gorgeous paper-cut images of birds, guns, cowboy hats, and horses, these poems conjure memory, old Hollywood westerns, devastation, and the colonization of the west. Crowe introduces the poetic work within a feminist framework with three epigraphs by literary legends Adrienne Rich, Nicole Brassard, and Marguerite Duras. In the collections first poem, “Her Western Landscape,” she introduces Clem, who is sitting in the house her father built on the edge of town, and carries us through the narritive of ,em>Quivering Land.. Within a queer lens, Crowe raises important questions of gender, sexuality, and the various shards of identity. She asks what are the lines drawn on land, the markings on bodies, and brutality of survival. Where language quivers, its the lines between the lines; the landscape of Crowe’s poetry that distills memory, meaning and loss. Quivering Land captures the endless shadows a western sunset truly casts. – Shannon Webb-Campbell for the Telegraph journal