Belinda Betker (aka Dyke Van Dick) is a prairie-born poet living in Saskatoon with her Australian wife and their rescue dog, a springer-spaniel/terrier cross. The first edition of this poetry collection was a 2020 finalist for two Saskatchewan Book Awards.

Belinda’s poetry and award-winning haiku are also published on-line and in various anthologies, literary journals, and chapbooks.

Belinda is a founding member of two long-running Saskatoon writing groups, Sisters’ Ink and The Obsessors. She was also a founding and longtime board member of the Saskatoon Writers’
Collective.

In Phases, Belinda Betker deftly captures what it is like for those who don’t fit within rigid notions of what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl”. Capturing different phases in a life, with power and nuance she takes readers on a luminous journey of a young girl’s coming-of-age, her burgeoning sexuality (and the confusion and disorientation therein), the pitfalls of an unhappy marriage, the triumphant release of coming out, and the liberating power of drag.

In these poems, readers will find a celestial and transcendent re-discovering of the self, an unraveling of society’s expectations of gender roles, love, and desire and how these falsehoods threaten to eclipse our truth. Phases slides through time, summoning profound memories of the loss of childhood innocence through each gendered ritual, yet the resilient heart of a tomboy who stands up to bullies and can “tie a tie better than anyone” is too powerful to suppress. Betker then takes us into adulthood-an experience cut sharp by the “dark side of the moon” with a health crisis and surgery-and the victorious recovery and unearthing of buried desire and resplendent sensuality. Phases is mercurial and unpredictable, a celebration of the non-conformist in each of us.

http://belindabetker.com

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