Post-Apothecary
Finalist for the Archibald Lampman Award
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award for Poetry
Alcuin Society Award for Excellence, Third
Winner of the International Festival of Authors' Battle of the Bards
Archibald Lampman Award Judges' Citation
“Sandra Ridley’s collection of poems Post-Apothecary explores the physical embodiments and poetic possibilities of illness. The tone ranges from fever-induced fragments to folk-remedy archaica, and
Post-Apothecary walks the eerie histories of the sanatorium and the asylum. Calling Post-Apothecary lush and adventurous, the judges underscored Ridley’s influence on the current generation of young writers in Canada. Ridley offers us neither diagnosis nor cure, but sits with us through “An onslaught of nights.””
Reviews •
"Rarely and miraculously I read something that stays with me as Post-Apothecary has done, a book which caught in my throat with its lilt and its language, its utterly mesmerizing tone. Inspired by a visit to a building that was once a tuberculosis sanatorium, the poems in Post-Apothecary are the shiverings of the afflicted, the captive and the still-living; a tender and unflinching understanding of loss of control. If you haven’t read aloud recently, this is the book you need to gift yourself with. There is a sharp awareness of breath here that makes reading aloud a pleasure; pauses by turns soft and gasping give way to revelations both fevered and lucid. Journeys through terrifying emotions — illness, isolation, hurt and threat of more hurt — examine incomprehensible states. Ridley is a master of control, of gentle voice expressing horror and fever pitch reaching joy. There is intensity to this tumult; a visceral, scary and ultimately happy intensity of being grounded in present and post." — Carmel Purkis for the 49th Shelf
“Ridley applies the “innovative” poetics of disjuncture — wrenched syntax, agrammatical statement and a teasing refusal of lyrical utterance…the result is postmodern, feminist Gothic.” — George Elliot Clark for The Halifax Chronicle Herald
“Sandra Ridley’s poetry collection Post-Apothecary is a gothic marvel of delicacy and toughness. It’s almost painfully beautiful as it anatomizes pain…I crave this exquisite degree of finesse.” — Kateri Lanthier for the 49th Shelf
“An unbearably beautiful study of a medical world that hardly could seem to have helped anyone.” — Lori Cayer for The Winnipeg Free Press
“Ridley's Post-Apothecary is a complex and complicated book, deceptively small and gracefully beautiful, impossible to properly describe, and even more difficult to put down.” -- rob mclennnan for Dusie
“Pedlar Press has a reputation for publishing some of the most beautiful and engaging books in the country. That reputation holds true with Sandra Ridley's Post-Apothecary, an elegant follow-up to her award-winning Fallout.” —Eric Schmaltz for Broken Pencil