Slender Certainties
Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes
Published in 2025
by Aeolus House
ISBN 978-1-987872-71-2
About this Book
Slender Certainties, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes’ fifth book of poetry, continues her poetic quest to make sense of the world and her place in it. In this deeply private, yet revealing collection, the page is a radical space where poems are freed to touch, to grieve, to desire, and to wonder. Returning to themes of love, loss and life’s dilemmas that fuelled her earlier work, she expands their scope, drawing inspiration from science, concepts of time, and the inescapable truth of her own mortality.
Praise for the author’s previous books:
In Travelling Light, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes … produces for the reader, from line to line to line that satisfying pleasure of mutable, unexpected recognitions … these poems risk a “sloping boundary” of meanings, and play them out to fullest potential.
~ Maxiane Berger, author of Winnows
"Any Waking Morning is a luminous collection of poems, combining delight in the senses, intellect, emotion and spirit. … I love the musical flow of her lines, the internal rhymes, the visual shape of the poems on the page. She is a care-ful poet, naming and articulating with care and caring about her subjects and her language"
~ Ellen S. Jaffe, author of Skinny-Dipping with the Muse
“Mornings, for Soutar-Hynes, are waking to a sensual surround, to thought and writing. Her poems convey a painterly gaze, alert to subtlety of colour, tone; their sculptural presentation on the page gives visual pause, pace, emphasis … This is wonderful writing.”
~ Cornelia Hoogland, author of Trailer Park Elegy/p>
Readings & Events
- Slender Certainties:
Launch:
Society Clubhouse
967 College Street
May 24, 2025,
Doors open at 1:30 - Readings begin at 2:00pm. - Heart-Threads: Bonds that Bind:
A National Poetry Month Reading
by the Long Dash Group, and Launch of our Chapbook by the same name
Wednesday, April 30, 2025, 7:00-8:30pm
At the Foy House,
92 Isabella Street, Toronto - A video of Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes reading from Any Waking Morning (Inanna Publications, 2019).
- In September 2020, Mary Lou joined other Toronto poets from the Long Dash Group to film a C0VID-delayed, outdoor reading in celebration of National Poetry Month.