Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The trouble with honesty, it has no / final answers, leaves you in the cranny / where nothing left unknown meets finding out.
The puzzles of poetry and marriage are these: How to hold on to what you also release? How to protect love when other loves are put between? In this collection of sixty-nine “fifteeners” – sonnet-like constellations of five tercets – Jeffery Donaldson explores the outcomes of both questions over the course of a life in verse and a loving thirty-one-year open marriage.
The poems orbit around two readings that Donaldson and his wife chose for their wedding: a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke about two people protecting one another’s solitude; and a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in which the prince is told, “You are responsible for your rose.”
As openbound turns toward open marriage itself – its risks, its revelations, its misunderstandings, its wounds under cultural scrutiny – the work reveals itself foremost as a book of love poems, continuing Donaldson’s long devotion to a metaphoric both/and poetics capacious enough to hold loving and freedom in the same breath.
“openbound is a reflection on what love is or can become when the doors of a marriage are opened. All the world will have an opinion. Time structures these poems into a narrative that starts with the meeting of two, then of others, to end considering where the couple will rest in their final sleep. In between, with grace and wordplay, with heart and intelligence, openbound establishes that in whatever configuration it presents itself, ‘love is the hard stuff.’” Ricardo Sternberg, author of Some Dance
“One of Canada’s most pre-eminent metaphor detectives turns his attention to open relationships and the forging and curation of true intimacy. Within the tidy stop-and-start of blank iambic triplets, these poems meander through history and epanorthotic shifts to mine, with honesty and abundant wit, the messy question: ‘Does love survive more love?’ Only Jeffery Donaldson could (openly) marry the cerebral and the granular to love’s ‘shifting centres of gravity’ so gracefully.” Alexandra Oliver, author of Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway and Hail, the Invisible Watchman
“In openbound, Jeffrey Donaldson recounts the ups and downs of a relationship that dares to test the bounds of what a marriage is or could be. Using language at once playful and economical, Donaldson brings the reader, ‘the last person to be left out,’ into a nontraditional love story, and in so doing entertainingly challenges our notions of both ‘love’ and ‘story.’” Misha Solomon, author of My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet
“Jeffery Donaldson's openbound is a resolute narrative of a marriage moving to open marriage told in the exquisite precision of form: each page five tercets in syllabics, ten syllables per line. Form provides restraint. Like the great poets, Donaldson has the poise to unravel the complexities of love, both the most profound and ridiculous thing humans can do.” Ross Leckie, author of The Critique of Pure Reason
“Love affairs have long been the banquet of poetry, but Jeffery Donaldson’s remarkable openbound refreshes tradition with its candid exploration of open marriage. This fascinating book of linked sonnets gives us a new portrait of polyamory, exploring a marriage of extreme loyalty to a partner even as the high emotional price of the sexual jealousy is paid. The triangulations affect all aspects of emotional life and family relationships, including partners and children. Witty, consummately crafted, and unafraid of complexity, it’s at once devasted — and devasting. openbound’s deft lines and wordplay feel like being on a balance ball with the poet himself.” Molly Peacock, author of The Widow’s Crayon Box