In a voice that shifts from ironic and quirky to contemplative and speculative, The Time of Falling Apart follows the poet through the inevitable passage of memory and time, and a search for meaning in a world rife with injustice. Without a traditional faith to navigate the horrors and wonders of life on earth, Wendy Donawa lingers with small beauties in a spiritual quest to keep love alive in a “darkening world.” The speaker’s eyes are wide open on catastrophes of aging, illness and family strife. But early memories are idyllic, entangled in the tides and towns of Vancouver Island, grounded by the coast’s sensory world: “the tide’s pebbly click and shush / and crows cawing in the arbutus.” As she ages, the speaker’s internal narrative expands to consider a wider world populated with casualties of colonizing desires, fuelled by competing ideologies and a destabilizing pandemic—the “time of falling apart.” Here are the social hells of racism, war, colonial violence and homelessness. Here are despair over a damaged earth and grief over nature’s destruction. And yet, how not to notice when bees hum in the lavender, cyclamen gleams in December, and bears burrow in their marvellous, layered coats? When Bach blasts on the sound system, friends and cappuccinos are at hand, and, at the back of it all, there is always the unfathomable, glorious mystery of the cosmos. Elegiac, meditative and unwaveringly kind, this collection is for anyone who has felt unable to reconcile the implacable passing of time, but determined to recognize love and beauty wherever they may be found.