BY SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI
When Dani Couture was 10 years old, she wrote a fan letter to the novelist Sidney Sheldon. Couture, a selfdescribed “military brat”, was the child of parents in the Canadian Forces; she used to buy paperbacks at yard sales and flea markets on and off whatever base they were seconded to. Sheldon, the bestselling author of popular novels and the creator of the 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, was the young Couture’s favourite writer. She posted her missive, and Sheldon wrote back. “I remember getting the letter”, Couture says. “It came in a creamy, thick envelope that had a burgundy inlay. He sent a simple card, but he was generous with his words. He wrote that a kid my age should probably not be reading his books.”
Flash forward a few decades, and Couture is now the author of four books of her own, including the 2010 collection Sweet, which was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. The poems in her newest book, Listen Before Transmit (Wolsak & Wynn), were written in the wake of Yaw, a 2014 collection that focused on grief and loss. “It was an almost physical sensation of pushing away from that book and what it was speaking to”, Couture says about the process of writing her new work. “I wanted to think more outwardly.”