Wellwater

''Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken'' - Michael Hoffman, LRB Wellwater, by Karen Solie, demonstrates a poet writing at the height of her powers. In poems that are supple, philosophical, bracingly honest and ribbed with erudition, Wellwater conducts a self-interrogative conversation with a culture in crisis and a natural world on the brink. Thresholds abound, ''doors between dimensions'' where past selves or lost loved ones speak to us again: ''death is not Saskatchewan'' shrugs one encountered soul, ''we don''t all know each other in this place''. Solie excels as a laureate of the transitory, of ''baffling flats... tiny museums of illegalities'', motel rooms exuding a ''low hum of menace''. Her roving, syntactically elegant poems will often resolve in disarming directness, a precise admission of the emotional stakes. Karen Solie is increasingly recognised as one of the essential voices in world poetry. Wellwater will delight those already in the know, while new readers of her work will be astonished. ''Powerful, philosophical, intelligent . . . [Solie is] adept at pulling great wisdom from the ordinary'' - Griffin Prize judges Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie and Carl Phillips

Auteur
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. She is the author of five collections of poems including Pigeon, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Trillium Award for Poetry. She was International Writer-in-Residence at the University of St Andrews in 2011, and is an Associate Director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio programme. Her poems have been published in the US, the UK, Australia, and Europe, and have been translated into French, German, Korean, Hebrew, and Dutch. Her first UK collection, The Living Option: Selected Poems, was published in 2013. She lives in Toronto. Wellwater is her fifth poetry collection.

Texte du rabat

A stunning collection by Karen Solie, a poet 'by whom the language lives'