Emanations
Prathna Lor
April 26, 2022
72 PAGES | ISBN 978-1-989496-49-7
**Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry**
**Shortlisted for the 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry**
In Prathna Lor’s first full-length collection we are introduced to a unique voice in Canadian poetry. Moving fluidly between prose poems and more fractured, open verse, Lor meditates on voice, on disaster and on identity, pushing always against commodification, against a consumable narrative.
Advance Praise
"In the luminous pages of Emanations we encounter nothing less than a radical philosophy of being: 'I never emerge / seeking only insurgence / a moment of recovery / to listen extraordinarily.' The language here is insistently embodied yet metaphysical – affective, conceptual, and inspiringly bold in both directness and vulnerability: 'If whatever can be said / is eruption, let me speak plainly.' Prathna Lor has gifted us with a vital book for our time, a needful summons to life and possibility ever abounding: 'What will it take for you to know that it’s enough / To wander into marvels.'" – David Chariandy, author of Soucouyant and Brother
"These poems conduct language in the manner of electricity passing through the body. Emanations is a compassionate transmission of mutating reverence and alienation for this life. Prathna Lor allows us to receive 'untouchable slumbering / beneath the creak.' Here is delight, terror and peace. Wander in and receive them.” – Lee Suksi, author of The Nerves
Reviews
Welcoming the Calamity (Emma Telaro, Montreal Review of Books, 04/07/2022)
"Lor both interrogates and reaffirms the lyrical subject by proposing a fractured yet expansive self. This collection is for the poetry reader looking for a new and luminous literary voice."
Prathna Lor, Emanations: Poems (rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog, 19/05/2022)
"Lor writes across the contours of self-creation and discovery, articulating values of both the collective and the personal, and the ways through which so much is lost through commodification."
Interviews
Queer Coded: Interview with Prathna Lor (All Lit Up, 29/06/2023)
"I’m not sure I would characterize my writing as being either overtly or covertly queer.... and, at least for me, it’s about honouring all the things that may emerge as “queer” (or a different word or name in a future time) as that which asks us to pause, disrupt, reflect on, or reimagine our modes of being and ways of thinking, and open up towards something unnamable but adamantly exhilarating."
"I Saw That Language Could Break and Be Reassembled" Prathna Lor on Early Reading & Their Poetry Debut (Prathna Lor, Open Book, 15/03/2022)
"I remember being viscerally struck by The Waves [by Virginia Woolf]. I felt something in my gut. There was beauty and voice and although a novel I saw, for the first time, what a poem is and what it could do."
Articles
Trans Day of Visibility Reads (All Lit Up, 31/03/2023)
Emanations is included in this great roundup.
Queer Coded: 2023 LAMBDA Literary Award Finalists (All Lit Up, 29/03/2023)
A showcase of the finalists for the 2023 LAMBDA Literary Awards.
A ‘best of’ list of 2022 Canadian poetry books (rob mclennan, DUSIE, 01/01/2023)
It's wonderful to see Prathna make this best of 2022 list from the remarkably well-read Rob McLennan.
Excerpt
Click here to read an excerpt of Emanations.
