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Winner of the Latner Writers' Trust Poetry PrizeA profound new collection from one of poetry's rising stars
"Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: ' . . . He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.' . . . And, yes, as we embark on the third millennium of our so-called Common Era, she is indeed the one by whom the language lives." -Michael Hofmann,
London Review of Books
A sublime singer of existential bewilderment, Karen Solie is one of contemporary poetry's most direct and haunting voices. A poet of the in-between places-the purgatory of wayside motels and junkyards, the abandoned Calgary ski jump and the eternal noon of Walmart-her poems stake out startlingly new territory and are songs for our emerging world, an age of uncertainty and melting icebergs.
In Solie's new collection,
The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, she restlessly excavates our civilization, the moments of tough luck, casual violence, naked desire, and inchoate menace, pursuing "Beauty and terror / in equal measure" and fixing on the "Intrigue of a boarded-up building. / We want to get in there and find out what's the matter with it." Amplifying the elegant recklessness of her Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection
Pigeon, these poems bear an uncanny poetic intelligence and unflinching vision.
List of contents
Ode
The Corners
Rental Car
Fables of the Reconstruction
A Western
When Asked Why He'd Been Talking To Himself, Pyrrho Replied He Was Practicing To Be A Nice Fellow
Affirmations
Museum of the Thing
The World
Your News Hour is Now Two Hours
Childhood Triptych
Be Reasonable
The National Gallery
Rothko via Muncie, Indiana
Interior
Mole
Via
I Let Love In
Lift Up Your Eyes
All That Is Certain Is Night Lasts Longer Than The Day
Keebleville
Birth of the Rifle
The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out
Forty
Life is Carnival
Roof Repair and Squirrel Removal
Sault Ste. Marie
Wrap Party
Conversion
The National Gallery II
The Midlands
Lord of Fog
Darklands
A Good Hotel in Rotterdam
Trouble Light
Bitumen
Prospect
Museum of the Thing II
Rural Conflation Sonnet
For the Ski Jump at Canada Olympic Park, Calgary
Against Lyric
The One Who Asks is the One Who Answers
Spiral
Man is a Rational Animal
The Living Option
About the author
Karen Solie
