Noble Orphan

Andrea Nicki

Noble Orphan explores several related themes and issues: immigration, ESL teaching and cross- cultural mothering; traditional mothering and fathering; the social constructions of masculinity and femininity; violence in gender relations; child abuse and the lack of communal responsibility for child welfare; home and homelessness; mental health and psychiatry; trauma and healing; female friendship and community; ecofeminist spirituality; and animal and environmental protection. Like her first poetry book Welcoming (Inanna Press), Noble Orphan is a reflective collection that challenges destructive values while promoting ecofeminist ones, a cooperative, ecologically sustainable world with “beehive love” (from“Beehive Love”). It spans a wide range of emotions: there is empowered anger—words that “catch on fire” (from “Fire-Eater”)—but also care, compassion, and gentlessness—“the light touch of the dragonfly” (from “One-Year-old Girl”). The creative use of language and beautiful simplicity of many of the poems enables the reader to enter the writing with ease.

About the Author

Andrea Nicki was born and grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Queen’s University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. She is Faculty Lecturer in narrative medicine and applied health ethics in the Department of Health Science at Simon Fraser University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Canadian and international journals and anthologies such as The Brock Review, Rampike, The Goose, Philosophy Now, Magnolia: A Journal of Women’s Literature II, Women Write Their Bodies: Stories of Illness and Healing, My Body, My Health: Women’s Stories, Different Art: An Anthology on Disability and Arts, Women and Environments International, and She is Everywhere: Volume 3.