Tanya Bellehumeur - Allatt

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in Poetry

“Prediction” by Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt


Nine months from now,
after all this sequestering
is over, the ban is lifted
and we can leave our houses,
there’ll be a boom.

Thousands even millions
of babies coming into our
bruised and anxious world
after our season of quiet cloister.

There are only so many hands
of Solitaire we can play.

If babies are made
when the power goes out
and we go to bed
a bit earlier than usual
how much more
when we’re confined
to our homes
with only each other
for company?

I see the tiny bodies
forming even now,
knit together
with the strands
of our social isolation,
these new ones
bursting forth
from our collective
quarantine.

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Reviews

“The writing is almost lyrical. It is a beautiful thing”
—Toby A. Welch /SaskBooks


“Her writing is on point, allowing us to travel with her. And it’s engrossing: we keep turning the pages, wanting to know more.”
—Yara El-Soueidi, Montreal Review of Books


“It’s quite a feat to couple the chaos of the Middle East with the chaos of adolescence.”
—Bronwyn Drainie, Literary Review of Canada


“In Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt’s hands, words become anything but ordinary—from the scent of lindens along a lakeshore, the imprint of wings on snow, to her father’s last winter on earth, the serious business of living. Poems both fearless and humble. Tenderly, forcefully, they influence our lives.”
—Susan Musgrave, author of Hunger


“Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt returns in memory to her early adolescence with her peacekeeper father in
war-torn 1980s Beirut, and with honesty and courage traces the legacy of terror in her life and the lives of loved ones and strangers. Each of these thirty-two essays illuminates the psychic consequences of trauma from a different angle, adding up to a multi-faceted portrait of a woman whose personal history won’t let her ignore the costs of societal violence. Thoughtful, compassionate, and
relevant, Carrying War is an eloquent plea for  peace, and a testament to human resilience and the
healing power of art.”
—Susan Olding, author of Big Reader

Photography credit: Emma Allatt

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