The Bat Had Blue Eyes

Every family weaves its own web of secrets, lies and betrayals. Poet Betsy Warland has attempted to unravel the web one family has created in a prairie farmhouse. The Bat Had Blue Eyes shows that despite attempts at change, some family patterns are doomed to repeat themselves in successive generations. Fellow Canadian writer Dionne Brand says Warland "writes us with a dangerous and saving clarity that every woman must give birth to herself, find a new home, claim the truth of her memory."

In The Bat Had Blue Eyes, Canadian poet Betsy Warland transports the reader to a prairie farmhouse where family patterns repeat undetected. Once there, she deftly reveals how language encodes pain-filled memories as a mystery. This is a journey rich in sense, smell, and texture with the writer in exquisite control, molding and shaping the language that has constrained her, until it sets her free.

Betsy Warland has written several books of poetry and two plays, including the script version of The Bat Had Blue Eyes. Her most recent books include a collection of prose and essays, Proper Deafinitions, and Two Women in a Birth, a collection of her collaborative writing with Daphne Marlatt. She edited InVersions: Writing by Dykes, Queers, Lesbians and lives on a sea mountain island off the coast of British Columbia.

Betsy Warland has written several books of poetry and two plays, including a script version of The Bat Had Blue Eyes. Her most recent books include a collection of prose and essays, Proper Deafinitions, and Two Women in a Birth, a collection of her collaborative writing with Daphne Marlatt. She edited In Versions - Writing by Dykes, Queers, Lesbians and lives on a sea mountain island off the coast of British Colombia.