Splitting Off

Triny Finlay’s debut collection of poetry is a meditation on the self’s negotiation with the material world. Finlay pushes poetic form and language, creating images of love and loss that are at once playful and profoundly disturbing. The poems in this collection are rife with metaphorical leaps and unexpected associations: the troubled self as conjoined twins or as a flatiron building; the predatory lover as axe-wielding gardener; coming-of-age as a surgical procedure. Blurring the line between subject and object, the voices in these poems explore individual experience from multiple points of view, never privileging any one possibility. These voices fill the book with startling discoveries of conflict and hope, simultaneously stitching and ripping the fabric of female identity.