Raven Chapbooks launches two new titles for their Indigo Series, Fall 2024: Susan Alexander’s "Berberitzen" and Lorraine Gane’s "If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb"

Lorraine Gane’s beautifully designed chapbook, "If I Have Known Beauty: Elegies for Phyllis Webb", charts the poet’s journey through the loss of her beloved mentor and friend, Phyllis Webb. Each poem is a step through the Bardo of her own grief. Her poems, plain-spoken and lyrical, are as delicately woven as Webb’s treasured gift of a peacock scarf. Ghazal-like couplets “leap” from her original shock and anguish, as “waves of grief come and go,” echoing the Bardo’s passage from death to rebirth, and final acceptance of What Is.
—Wendy Donawa

"Berberitzen" is a masterful braiding of language and image that leaves a bodily impact; these pages are filled with a scent and taste of desire. Poems to her beloved, “He filled the horizon/ when he wasn’t there” trace “the night’s hard slap” as diagnosis becomes reality. One can only hope that this holy love story will fill her days and nights as “Pollen on salal/ each leaf vein etched/ with gold dust…”
—Terry Ann Carter

Lorraine Gane is author of five books of poetry. Selections from her first book, "Even the Slightest Touch Thunders on My Skin" (Black Moss Press, 2002), were shortlisted for the Canadian Literary Awards in 1997 and the League of Canadian Poets chapbook contest. Among her publications since moving to Salt Spring Island, B.C., are the chapbooks "Beauty and Beyond: Songs of Small Mercies" and "Arc of Light" by Raven Chapbooks, and two full-length volumes of poems, "The Way the Light Enters" (Black Moss Press, 2014) and "The Blue Halo" (Leaf Press, 2014). She is co-winner of the 2023 Gwendolyn MacEwen Award for Best Suite of Canadian Poems.

Susan Alexander is the author of two collections of poems, "Nothing You Can Carry" and "The Dance Floor Tilts", Thistledown Press. Her poems have won awards and appeared most recently in The Southern Review as well as anthologies and literary magazines in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. Susan has hosted poetry readings and panels for the Federation of BC Writers and Victoria’s Festival of Writers. She lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, the traditional and unceded territory of the Squamish people.