The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canadian poet Solie, Griffin Poetry Prize winner for 2009's Pigeon, opens her latest collection with an ode to spring, but here spring doesn't simply herald a rebirth in the natural world. She sees "tulip heads removed one by one/ with a sand wedge" while "A hammer claws/ to the edge of a reno and peers over." Solie's poems exist in landscapes diverse and unforgiving, in which the tension between the modern world and the natural one is captured by an often-conflicted narrator. In "Be Reasonable," the speaker battles bedbugs, but laments, "I didn't want to kill the house spiders but they died/ in my engagement with the larger project." Exhibiting an unceasing curiosity about the speaker's surroundings, the poems in this book move from hotels and galleries to highways both urban and rural; they detail battles with squirrels and bedbugs, while constantly questioning the choices we make and the priorities we choose. In "Sault Ste. Marie" the speaker wonders, "How difficult could it be/ to stay here? Anonymous and thereby absolved." Solie's latest collection chronicles the struggles of daily life with wit and intelligence.
