Lent: Poems

Finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards

In these peculiar times, we are thrust back into ourselves in a kind of suspension: one in which only private life exists yet threatens to become trivial through a sense of mutual, overarching dread.

Lent from award-winning writer Kate Cayley is built from this tension, exploring domestic and artistic life amidst the environmental crisis and the surprising ways that every philosophical quandary--large and small--converges in the home, in small objects, conversations, and moments. The grotesque and the tedious, the baroque and the banal, intertwine in the first three sections. Meticulous depictions of spectacle run into the repetition of daily domestic life: trying to explain time to children, day trips to the planetarium, and the warnings of strangers; these are interspersed with depictions such as Mary Shelley recalling the monster, the inner life of a seventeenth century portrait sitter, and Ted Hughes's second wife telling her story to the dead Sylvia Plath. The title section explores religious faith; how belief is itself a repetition, a slow accumulation over time, just like love or forgiveness.

Lent is an exquisite work of our era, asking us to contemplate what it means to live in a broken world--and why we still find it beautiful.

KATE CAYLEY is the author of several books, including the poetry book, Lent, and the short story collection, How You Were Born, winner of the Trillium Book Award and shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. She has won the O. Henry Short Story Prize, the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, and the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. She has been a finalist for the K. M. Hunter Award, the Carter V. Cooper Short Story Prize, and the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and been longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize and CBC Books Prizes in both poetry and fiction. Cayley lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.