math for couples

by Adele Graf

Overview

In math for couples, we re-visit the past to discover our place in the contemporary world. A long-dead father watches his daughter work on her Mac, a woman converses with a photo of her young self. Adele Graf leads us on a journey that is rich and hopeful, evoking powerful nostalgia even if we've never been to the places described. When these poems release us back to our current lives, we feel restored to savour the warmth in a “glad red hat” and the love that arrives “still summer lush.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771831956
Publisher:	Guernica Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/01/2017
Series:	Essential Poets series , #242
Pages:	95
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Adele Graf grew up outside New York City and immigrated to Canada in 1968. She has worked as a writer and editor, and taught writing in the public and private sectors in Halifax and Ottawa. Her first book of poetry, math for couples, was published by Guernica Editions in 2017 and shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman Award. Her chapbook, Directions to Suffern NY circa 1950, won the Tree Reading Series chapbook prize and was published in 2018. Her second book of poetry, buckled into the sky, was published by Guernica Editions in 2021. She lives in Ottawa with her spouse.

Read an Excerpt

I share a cup of tea with my grandmother / who's been dead for forty years — / she rises as I split the wrap / on my Swee-Touch-Nee tea, / its flat orange box, mustard trim / like the gilt and crimson / tin treasure chest / her tea came in then — / “The Aristocrat of Teas”

Editorial Reviews

math for couples is a warm and playful debut collection. You can feel the pleasure Adele Graf takes in the words she juggles and the forms she explores in this very intimate adventure.

Stuart Ross

Whether she’s revisiting fraught scenes from her past with wry humour or facing them down deadpan, Adele Graf infuses whatever she touches—bric-a-brac, childhood haunts, or stricken relatives—with a vividness that places them stage-centre. Charting a memorable path through several generations of family upheaval and continuance, she evokes her grandmother’s New Jersey milliner shop, her father’s tragic early death, and her own journey to late-life plenitude with a sharp eye for the waystations that lead from disillusionment to delight.

Peter Richardson

Adele Graf’s poems explore the inner worlds of family, including grandmother, father, mother, husband, childhood self and aging self with an openness and honesty that is stunning, using her pen as both scalpel and microscope. A master of slant rhyme, she is also unafraid to experiment in the far reaches of poetics; and you’ll never think of popcorn in the same way again.

Mark Frutkin