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You Break It You Buy It

You Break It You Buy It

By Lynn Tait

You Break It, You Buy It features poems about disconnection, misconnections: the loss of friendships and identity, our voice, our purpose. At its core, it is a collection of elegies railing against and dealing with toxic relationships, from fair-weather friends, controlling mothers to narcissists. These poems invite the reader into personal experiences, public observations and the price we pay, positive and negative for our interactions with the media, our global and local conflicts, environmental challenges, the pandemic, the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. She writes about the dark underside of our lives with a sense of danger, humour and of hope for reconnection in the future with our community and our world.

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(Essential Poets)

9781771838108

100 pages |

Regular price $17.95 USD
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Reviews

Tait is a perceptive observer, asking penetrating questions about our collective mistakes, our addictions, and our family legacies. We quickly trust her disarming voice to cut through the crap and tell us the truth. A terrific debut!

John Wall Barger, author of Smog Mother

In Lynn Tait’s debut volume, dark humour and a no-nonsense approach to life’s challenges – large and small – command the reader’s attention ... Across this collection, we smell the “stink” and feel the “heart pain” that is everywhere. And yet, Tait is undefeated. She helps us see that “life’s a controlled burn.”

Ruth Panofsky, author of Bring Them Forth

Lynn Tait’s You Break It You Buy It is a surefooted book by a mature writer in the best of the peoples’ poetry tradition. These passionate assessable poems come from a poet knows all of life, from love to loss, its bumps and beauty and everything in between.

Bruce Hunter, author of Galestro

Tate’s finely-honed poetic razor slices through the detritus of rupture and disconnection—the relational tangle that makes us so beautifully human. An exquisite soul-punch to sting, heal, and tenderize.

David Stones, poet, performer, Infinite Sequels, sfumato

Working past a legacy of disturbed and disturbing family relationships, Lynn Tait crafts with rich language and powerful images the treacherous core of heartbreak and the shocking loss of her son. She breaks the “silence that closed around us like a coffin,” and presents a deft and powerful treatment of grief, how it scrambles our minds and slows our bodies. Tait’s gaze widens past personal trauma to environmental catastrophes in tough – but welcome – poems that name events like “a toxic deal sealed in triplicate.” Hers is a poetry that is “ready to hear our voices, touch our differences.”

Maureen Haynes, author of Sotto Voce

An expansive and wide-ranging collection of poems that are always open-hearted even as they confront the ills of the world, whether environmental and political conflicts, the harms done within families or betrayals by friends and lovers. Lynn Tait’s debut book is rich in imagery and forthrightness in equal measure, “a yard sale of porcelain hearts, all cracked”. These are indeed “dangerous poems”, in the very best sense.

Frances Boyle, author of Openwork and Limestone

From the potential toxicity of family relationships, to environmental catastrophes and the vagaries of friendship, to global conflicts, the pandemic and personal loss, Tait tells it like it is, but sure as hell makes it mighty engrossing along the way.

David Stones, Verse Afire Magazine

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About the author

Lynn Tait is a Toronto-born award-winning poet and photographer residing in Sarnia, Ontario where she lives with her husband Robert. She has published poetry in major magazines and journals since 1978 including Contemporary Verse 2, FreeFall Magazine, Windsor Review, Vallum, Feathertale Review, and the Literary Review of Canada, as well as in over 100 anthologies. Her poems have placed and been shortlisted in various contests. She has published a chapbook, Breaking Away, and co-authored a book, Encompass I. Her photography/digital images have appeared on the covers of nine poetry books. She’s participated in workshops with Susan Musgrave, George Elliot Clarke, Di Brandt, Alice Major, Ellen Bass, Marie Howe and Karen Solie, John Sibley Williams, Marj Hahne, Lisa Richter and Kim Addonizio. She is the co-founder of a long running workshop which included James Deahl, Norma West Linder and Venera Fazio; Committee Member/Organizer and MC with James Deahl for the Bluewater Reading Series 2014 -2016. Lynn Tait is a an associate member of The Academy of American Poets, full member in the League of Canadian Poets, a member of The Ontario Poetry Society and The Writers’ Union of Canada. Her book You Break It You Buy It is forthcoming September 2023 by Guernica Editions. She is working on her second book of poetry titled The Realm of In Between.