POETRY

SOME DAYS I THINK I KNOW THINGS

From the back of the book:

A contemporary retelling of the story of Cassandra, Rhonda Douglas’s Some Days I Think I Know Things explores what “truth” really means and asks what Homer’s iconic young prophetess might have to say to anyone wise enough to pay heed to her in the twenty-first century. We find Cassandra walking among us once more and, just prior to the sacking of a Troy not unlike any modern city, she sheds light on the idyllic domestic life that she shares with her father Priam, mother Hecuba, and the rest of her doomed, if royal, family. No sooner has she relished the timeless sexual awakening dreamt about by most girls, than she must stoically submit to the indignities of the invading Greeks. As a captive, she pronounces a series of prescient “Lost Prophesies” intended for our time. However much her Cassandra remains faithful to the figure of the ancients, Douglas destabilizes her heroine’s primacy as “truth-teller” with a witty, varied chorus whose voices we can’t fail to recognize from the quotidian of our present-day lives. Questions about how to construct personal narrative, the imminence of environmental apocalypse, and the power of young girls make Rhonda Douglas’s first book of poetry a fresh and unforgettable look at what causes the present to tick so inevitably from times immemorial.

Please support your local independent bookseller by asking them for a copy of Some Days I Think I Know Things: The Cassandra Poems.

Or, you can order online at www.chapters.ca or www.amazon.ca. (Outside of Canada, try Amazon in your country.)

The publisher, Signature Editions, can be reached at www.signature-editions.com and their books are distributed in Canada and the USA through the Literary Press Group and the University of Toronto Press.

You can follow the following link to the newsletter for the Tree Reading Series to read the poem “Hecuba” from the Cassandra series (Some Days I think I Know Things, Signature Editions, 2006). “Hecuba” won the 2006 Diana Brebner Award from ARC Magazine.

Please click on the player below to hear a couple of poems read at an Arc Magazine launch (Winter, 2007). “Dinner with the Pratts” was chosen as an Editor’s Choice for the 2007 Poem of the Year Award.