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Mrs Romanov by Lori Cayer  

Lori Cayer’s poetry collection Mrs Romanov reveals the unexpectedly quotidian concerns of Alexandra Feodorovna, the last tsarina of Imperial Russia.

Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna was many things. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, a dedicated dupe of the notorious mystic Grigori Rasputin—and the steadfast wife of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and mother to their five children.

In her collection of poems, Mrs Romanov, Lori Cayer gives voice to the expectations and fears of this powerful and ultimately doomed figure. With great empathy and emotion, she presents a portrait in poetry of a woman whose concerns, even as she navigates the ‘forest of eyes and gossiping teeth’ of her unwelcoming adoptive country, prove startlingly domestic. Cayer captures Alexandra’s devotion to her husband and her children, in particular her constant anxiety over her young hemophiliac son: ‘anyone who could see into this house / would see love / breathing itself like a tubercular lung / imprinting itself to life like a snapshot’. But in so doing, Cayer exposes another Alexandra, one whose attempts to bolster her politically inept husband caused Russia to veer sharply from autocracy to revolution, and her family from prosperity to fatal captivity.

prize

2019—Raymond Souster Award,
Long-listed

prize

2019—Pat Lowther Memorial Award,
Long-listed

prize

2020—Manitoba Book Awards Lansdowne Prize for Poetry,
Shortlisted

prize

2019—ReLit Awards, Poetry,
Shortlisted

Review quote

‘A compelling exercise in poetic biographical fiction, the series of nearly a hundred poems succeeds in creating a character out of a myth, in carving a human out of a mountain called Empress, while still maintaining a tantalizing distance between reader and subject. Though the porous beauty of this intricately woven narrative of the life of Alexandra Feodorovna occasionally finds itself in danger of being weighed down by the heft of the story Cayer has to tell, she always manages to steer her self-indulgent narrator back into realms of (relative) accessibility. The result is a domestic-epic of refreshingly delicate, sparse proportions.’

—Chelsea Peters, Contemporary Verse 2

Review quote

‘Cayer juxtaposes her characters’ richly textured private lives with rising social unrest, political struggle, and ravening gossipmongers. She captures the delicate balance of the Romanovs’ Inside and Outside Worlds and the fragility of their highly scrutinized lives through the motif of Fabergé eggs, ‘‘those bejewelled manifestations of us / ... / arrayed on the mantel.’’ ’

—Heather Olaveson, Canadian Literature

Review quote

‘While history has much to say about Alexandra Feodorovna, her turbulent life and abundant failures, Cayer delivers a compassionate and fully-embodied Alexandra, her voice at once intimate, demanding, petulant and loving. Informed by themes of gender, marriage, motherhood, and power, Mrs Romanov is a generous portrait of a woman both formed by and constrained within the flawed construct of European aristocracy near the end of the Victorian era—a most compelling read.’

—Jody Baltessen, Prairie Fire

Excerpt from book

Show your own mind, and don’t let others forget who you are

is it wrong that I feel a secret shame for my husband?
I can’t bear to watch him, a fish on the sand

his father’s men who use him for their own affairs
he inhales his rage with constant cigarettes

bends a hundred times a day
to the will of the one with whom he last spoke

twelve hours a day they bury him in paperwork
he diligently reads and signs every document

from banal approvals of Easter egg gifts for staff
to kill orders and death sentences

is it love or my own nature that spurs me on?
husband of capitulation, husband of avoidant ways

I apply myself to him as a poultice of pressure
describe a fist, a voice, push him out the door

inside and out I see all are displeased with him
he aligns his pencils

stubborn like an abandoned old rail car
he is pushed squealing or he is frozen in place

I tell God I fear I have married not an emperor
but a man in his ordinary cloak of skin

When dawn opens like a sash, a moment of blank

I recall all that has happened in painful cascade
long lists of unjust acts, and we

still imprisoned
tedious fabric of our humiliated lives

my blood runs cold as if Ive been sitting in dirt
entire days have gone abject, how much worse

our remaining riches smuggled this far
enough jewels left to buy a quite exile

our ten soft hands sewing for months
collateral stitched between the bones of our corsets

into belts and hat bands, seams and false buttons
ready to move, empty handed, at a moment’s notice

familiar handwork for confiscated days
bright bands of soreness to adorn our ribs

Unpublished endorsement

‘A riveting collection, right from the first poem. Cayer’s writing is sharply chiseled, resonant. In these highly crafted, taut poems, a complex chapter of Russia’s history, the demise of "the old brocaded world order" is explored through the lens of royalty but ultimately, isolation, family, and "love/breathing itself like a tubercular lung". A book of stark, beautiful, striking extremes: iron and lace, old and new regimes, and the dead "underfoot like wet carpet". A tour de force.’

—Jeanette Lynes, Author of Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare Poems


authorPic

Lori Cayer is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Dopamine Blunder (Tightrope Books, 2016), Attenuations of Force (Frontenac House, 2010) and Stealing Mercury (The Muses’ Company, 2004). Her poetry is endlessly informed by her editorial work in scientific research publishing. She lives in Winnipeg.

The Porcupine's Quill would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) is also gratefully acknowledged.

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POETRY / Canadian

POETRY / General

ISBN-13: 9780889844179

Publication Date: 2018-09-01

Dimensions: 8.75 in x 5.56 in

Pages: 128

Price: $16.95