As the most recent alumni of the Markin-Flanagan Canadian Writer-in-Residence position at the University of Calgary, Sina Queyras looks back at her time in Calgary with fondness. While her stay may not have been filled with the horseback riding and mountain climbing she envisioned, it was marked by the enthusiasm and sense of possibility of our literary community as well as the friendships that developed. It also turned into a fruitful writing period. She completed the chapbook Nineteen Short Stories by Samuel Beckett, printed by local publisher No Press, worked on an upcoming novel and a collection of essays and blog posts to be published this September.

Queyras’s newest poetry collection, Expressway, is due out this April from Coach House Books. The followup to her award-winning collection, Lemon Hound (Coach House, 2006), it is an intersection of romantic ode and postmodern warning about society’s dependence on cars and the modern infrastructure that supports them.

Queyras artfully manipulates tensions between technology and nature, modernity and traditionalism, convenience and responsibility — melding them into a cohesive whole.

“My poetry is one of collision,” explains Queyras. “It makes use of formal and innovative techniques. Lemon Hound was a collision between Woolf and Stein and myself; this is more like Wordsworth meets Blake, meets Alice Notley or Erin Moure and Samuel Beckett. Modernism refracted through the romantics and the conceptualists.” While the Romantics had a sublime view of nature and wandering clouds, Queyras has a sublime view of tires screeching across pavement. Her bard does not recite extravagant lyrics, she sticks her head out the toll booth window and asks for the fare.

With green as the new black and environmental responsibility on everyone’s agenda, it is embarrassing that we will gladly stop using plastic bags and buy organic food, but it gets real cold in winter and we are not eager to give up our cars anytime soon. “We want to look into the eyes of the deer and try to pretend we haven’t decimated their world,” says Queyras, “but I, too, am a romantic, and I don’t think it’s too late. I think it’s too late, in Lisa Robertson’s words, to be simple, but I want to believe there is much we can do to alter our course, and I want to leapfrog into that innovative future.”

In Queyras’s view, there is hope for us yet. Though, like any other Calgarian who has been on the road in rush hour traffic, she knows how dependent we are on our cars — driving to our distant and sprawling suburbs. “I am a child of car culture. I love roads, and I love expressways. I love cars and driving. I’m just really aware of the implications of that activity,” she says.

As a child, Queyras spent long hours in the backseat of her mother’s car, following her road builder father on jobs across the country, gaining a wide appreciation for, and insight into, the politics of roadways.

“Everything is about mobility in our society, and mobility is market, which has blindly decided our future for several centuries now. And largely this occurs without much scrutiny. Kids turn 16 and want a car, not a metro pass or a great bike. And cars, of course, make it less likely for communities to grow. We actually don’t experience a city when we drive it, we experience its roads and vistas. I try to walk whenever I can now. It connects me to where I am, and it reminds me of my addicted self. Car culture on a simple level leads to a kind of blindness around getting on the road and getting away from things one doesn’t want to deal with. It’s an addiction that our civilization is really hooked into and I’m not sure we understand the real costs of our habits yet.”