Some books come to you already knowing what they are. The Lost Stations by Cara Waterfall was like that for us, and today you can reserve a copy.
The title comes from the old rail stops along Toronto’s Beltline Trail, the ones Cara used to walk with her father, now overgrown or nearly gone. Those abandoned platforms become the way the whole book thinks about loss: the places we can’t get back to, what the ground keeps once the trains stop, and who we were when we stood waiting there.
The book moves in three parts, Traces, Vessel, and Tracks, each one coming at grief from a different distance. First the geological and ecological, then the domestic, then the family. Cara writes in centos, contrapuntals, duplexes, even a palindrome poem that folds back on itself the way grief does. Snow, hospitals, animals, weather and transit corridors keep turning up like stations along the line, places where meaning piles up and wears away and gathers again.
Here’s how one of the poems opens, “Snow in April I,” written for her father:
Snow thistles the water’s surface,
then vanishes,
like the flaxen stars.
The flakes fall into our palms
so we can hold
this fugitive light.
You can read three full poems from the manuscript on the book’s page before you decide.
The Lost Stations
Cara Waterfall
Limited edition paperback, 250 copies
$18.95
Pre-order your copy →
Read the sample poems →
We print small on purpose, and once the 250 are spoken for, that’s the edition.
A good few weeks for Cara
Cara wrote to me last month with some news, and I wanted to pass it on, because it’s been a lot.
“Cephalopod Logic” is one of 65 finalists for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. “Self-Portrait as Velvet Antlers” was shortlisted for the Alpine Poetry Prize. And the suite of poems she sent to the LemonLight Prize (apart from “Ballast,” which is in the anthology) is a finalist for Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize again. That’s her third time. Those poems are part of her next manuscript, daughtertongue, which I’m already looking forward to.
Poems from The Lost Stations have already won first place in Room’s 2020 Poetry Contest and the Magpie Award for Poetry, and landed a CBC Poetry Prize shortlist, so it’s lovely to see the new work finding readers too.
If you pre-order, thank you. A small press runs on exactly this, readers who say yes to a book before it exists.
More soon,
G. K. Allum (President & Founding Editor)