Wolf Sonnets

In his commanding poetry debut, Wolf Sonnets, R. P. LaRose undoes the sonnet’s classical constraints, retooling the form for current political circumstances. Packed with family lore, these poems reflect on how deeply we can trust the terms we use to construct our identity. A proud citizen of the Métis Nation, LaRose even questions his right to identify as such: “I was made in someone else’s home,” he writes. Wolf Sonnets is verse obsessed with names, infinity, numbers, categories, and interconnectedness. Depicting his ancestors as wolves—symbols of survival and protection—LaRose bring fresh insight to his wider poetic project: castigating the inequality, greed, and racism inherent to colonialism.

Reviews

“In concise poetry entrenched in nature and his Métis ancestry, entwined in political interrogations of identity, injustice, racism, and colonialism, R.P. LaRose provocatively makes the sonnet form his own.” – Robyn Fadden, Montreal Review of Books

“R.P. LaRose’s fierce and fiercely beautiful sonnets whirl like cyclones of dream and memory, converging on questions of Indigenous land stewardship, romantic heartbreak, family history, and Métis identity. LaRose’s clear-eyed, anticolonial sequence not only challenges the ‘flags and flagellations / of yet another not-empire / that calls itself a republic,’ but also tenderly attends to moments of metaphysical and spiritual intensity.” — Michael Prior

“Wolf Sonnets masterfully reinvents the idiom through alliance not with the canon, but nature: ‘I side with the wolves.’ Defying colonialism’s logic with a shapeshifting ‘I’ that ‘represent(s) no one’ and also the Métis Nation, ‘a self/unrelated to all the rest, alone,’ LaRose animates these histories by interrogating the sonnet form, in a brave, unforgettable work of linguistic reclamation.” — Virginia Konchan

“R. P. LaRose has made an old European poetic form new and vigorous again. This is a poet who ‘fell asleep among shadows / and woke among wolves.'” — Bert Almon