Planned Furnishings, by Lyndsay Kirkham

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Planned Furnishings is a collection of interdependent poems that look outward through the lives of other women and inward through the geography of the body and self. Moving across cities and eras, from Vienna and Toronto to China and England; engaging hauntings both personal and historical, these poems invite conversation around love, grief, friendship, and the unfinished stories we all carry. Attentive to lived experience, from early awakenings of self to the internal loneliness of miscarriage, the work refracts the familiar through deliberate shifts in perspective. The result is a collection that lingers, intentionally leaving readers with more questions than certainty. Lyndsay is a poet and literature teacher who was born in a rusted-out Canadian steel town during the late 1900s. After being made fun of by Gord Downie, she left for Europe where she made a home in the Austrian Alps. Following a half-decade of learning how to waltz, she headed to the density of a Brazilian metropolis where she found a husband and rescued a dog. Lyndsay has been writing since she could hold a pen, and often uses poetry and the essay format to poke at the intersections between feminism, history and abandonment. Lyndsay’s words have appeared in various print and digital publications, including: Ms. Magazine, Broken Pencil, Kiss Machine, Canadian Women Studies/les cahiers de la femme, The Daily Dot, The CBC, The Mary Sue and Metropole. She lives in a swamp with her son, her husband and her herd of ducklings.