Join us on Thursday, April 10th, from 6 - 7 pm at Flying Books at Neverland for an opportunity to hear from Karen Solie in our intimate bookstore/cafe/bar. Solie's new collection, Wellwater, is out this month with House of Anansi Press.
Admission is free, but please RSVP.
The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solie’s sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural, economic, and personal ideas of “value,” addressing housing, economic and environmental crisis, and aging and its incumbent losses. In an era of accelerating inequality, places many of us thought of as home have become unaffordable. In “Basement Suite,” the faux-utopian economy of Airbnb suggests people with property “share” it with us and, presumably, we should be grateful. In “Parables of the Rat” the speaker feels affinity with scavengers while also wanting the rats gone.
Having grown up in Saskatchewan on a small family farm, Solie sees the economic and environmental crises as inseparable. Climate change has made small farming increasingly untenable, allowing overbearing corporate control of food production. But hope, Solie argues, is as necessary to addressing the crises of our time as bearing witness, in poems that celebrate wonder and persistence in the non-human world. Tamarack forests in Newfoundland that grow inches over hundreds of years, the suddenly thriving pronghorn antelope, or a new, unidentified and ineradicable climbing vine, all hint at renewal, and a way to move forward.
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up on the family farm in southwest Saskatchewan, Canada. She is the author of five award-winning collections of poetry, including Pigeon (Anansi, 2009), winner of the Pat Lowther Award, Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Griffin Prize. She has received the Latner Poetry Prize and the Canada Council for the Arts Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for an artist in mid-career.
