If books come from books, as David W. McFadden has claimed, then TIME OUT OF TIME is a clear example, arising, very deliberately as it does, out of Etel Adnans astonishing collection entitled Time. The poems in TIME OUT OF TIME are in love with the poems in Adnans Time and, it seems, Paré has fallen in love with Times author, Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned poet and painteror perhaps it is that she has merely fallen in love with Adnans words. Parés poems mirror the form, the rhythm, the shape, the short, brief lines in her own spare missives that are the poems in Time. This mirroring increases the intensity of TIME OUT OF TIME, creating a rare intimacy in Parés collection. Parés work pays homage to Adnans work. Both collections pay homage to the world of the lesbian in the twenty-first century and to the world of the small poem. Using clear, crisp, well-defined language in visibly defined geometries, in stanza after sweet-smelling stanza, Paré attempts to examine the trials of this new century, the hush around the word lesbian, the hush of the worlds general collapse.
Arleen Paré was born and raised in Montreal, PQ. After completing a BA in Sociology and History and a BA and MA in Social Work, all at McGill University, she moved to Vancouver where she worked in bureaucratic environments for two decades. During this time Paré received her MA in Adult Education at the University of British Columbia. Paré is currently working towards a BA in Fine Arts at the University of Victoria. She currently lives in Victoria, BC.
Words, Paré says, are the staple we crave. In Parés meticulously crafted poems, whats as poignant as the pictures she creates with her words are the hesitations in the not-so-quiet spaces between the words, between each poem. Each is a constellation of desire, an offering and an uncertainty, shyness, boldness, questioningthe entire dance in the approach to a love interestnot yet loverbut the one we are courting. The writer craves saying the words. The lover craves hearing them. -- Shani Mootoo, author of Polar Vortex and Cane
Fire
Graceful, sensual, and evocative, Arleen Parés latest collection pays fitting homage to the poetry of the late Etel Adnan. Time Out of Time is also very much its own text, moving and beguiling, and expanding in multiple directions as it explores mortality, lesbian identity, and queer poetics. --
Annick MacAskill, author of Swimming Upwards and Murmurations
Arleen Parés Time Out of Time is a tender, explosive and erotic tribute to the Lebanese poet and visual artist Etel Adnan. With wit and joy at her affinity with Adnan, Paré draws Sapphic meditations of brevity and spareness, meditations full of leaps and pauses that surprise the reader. In declaring how she has become enthralled, even smitten, with Adnan as a lesbian artist, Paré takes us to a certain corner on a subconscious street / women and books binding, a corner where she faces the small and huge scales of death on our planet, and celebrates the ingenuity of womens impossible lives, the way we continue to thrive. -- Maureen Hynes, author of Sotto Voce
In her seventh decade, Paré encounters Etel Adnans Time. As she reads it, she hears the hush/the pages make. Inspired, she gives herself over to Adnans sheer attentiveness of writing backwards, and chronology, fixed meaning, syntax, and privacyreconfigure and vivify her recollections and musings. Alert: you will read this book more than once! -- Betsy Warland, author of BloodrootTracing the Untelling of Motherloss, 2nd edition, 2021"
