Apple Thieves

'I am drawn to paintings that catch glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that lead to other rooms,' Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly, with their charge of mystery, like this shell - 'an empty house / a nudge will set rocking / almost indefinitely' - collected on the coast of her native British Columbia, whose diverse populations and their migrations she evokes in 'Root Vegetables'. Today, long resident in France, she relishes Paris - 'Smelling of piss and baking bread / The city in its glory and dereliction' - 'time-hedged cottages' and the earthbound in all its fragility.

Auteur

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Beverley Bie Brahic grew up in Vancouver; today she lives in France. Apple Thieves is her fifth collection of poetry after Catch and Release, winner of the 2019 Wigtown Book Festival Alistair Reid Pamphlet Prize; The Hotel Eden; The Hunting of the Boar, a 2016 PBS Recommendation; White Sheets, a 2013 Forward Prize finalist for Best Collection and PBS Recommendation; and Against Gravity. Her many translations include books by Yves Bonnefoy, Hélène Cixous, and Charles Baudelaire; The Little Auto, her selection of Guillaume Apollinaire's First World War poems, was awarded the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize; Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud, was a finalist for the 2009 Popescu Translation Prize. She has received a Canada Council for the Arts Writing Grant and fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell.