JUST PUBLISHED: Ruth Roach Pierson
Author of "They’re Still Women After All: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (McClelland & Stewart 1986) among other academic studies, Ruth Roach Pierson published her first book of poems, Where No Window Was, with BuschekBooks of Ottawa in the spring of 2002, a year after retiring from thirty-one years of teaching as historian and feminist scholar first at Memorial University of Newfoundland and later at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her poems have appeared in ARC, CV2, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, MIX Magazine, Pagitica, Pottersfield Portfolio, Prism International, Queen’s Feminist Review, Quills, and Room of One’s Own as well as a number of anthologies. She won first place in the Third Annual Poetry contest (2002) of Word: Toronto’s Literary Calendar, was a finalist in the poetry category of the 2003 Pagitica Literary Contest, received an honourable mention in Fiddlehead’s 2003/2004 Ralph Gustafson Contest for Best Poem and an honourable mention in CV2’s 2007 Two-Day Poetry Contest. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their two cats, Haiku and Orange Roughy. Aide-Mémoire (also published by BuschekBooks) is her second book of poems.

As we enter the denouement of our lives, "everything tends towards aide-mémoire," the poet writes, the present moment often hooking into a chain of correspondences from the past or reverberating with strains of History buried within our beings. But memory can also play tricks, abandoning us to confusions, sending us searching for mnemonic aids. At the same time, the "now" sometimes catches us by unmediated surprise, as AIDE-MÉMOIRE, a book of relentless mulling, puzzlement and wonder, enthralls its readers.

"This deeply satisfying book is about time and history, inheritance and loss, both private and shared. It is a book of memory with a hard, bright edge. Why, asks Ruth Pierson, is memory so capricious? Where is the sense in what it loses, what it keeps, so much of the residue being painful to recall? AIDE-MÉMOIRE richly layers past and present selves (strangers to one another, both imperfect), acute observation and challenging ideas, disillusionment and rapture. A restless, honest, anti-nostalgic book, it sings ‘the holy mess of life’ into vivid being." - Stan Dragland