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Written in the near absence of creative works by Ukrainian Canadians of her generation, God of Missed Connections is a breakthrough collection by one of Canada’s leading young poets. This book is profound, devastating, and draws on Ukraine’s brave and bloody history as a means to explore the author’s place in the contemporary world.”This book explores a century of cultural assimilation in the West, an experience that is not unique to a Ukrainian-Canadian sensibility. In this book, I wanted to capture the sense of what it feels like to not know where you’re from, to be looking for connections, and to come up with ghosts. God of Missed Connections is just the way I’ve gone about sifting through my own cultural detritus. What makes it through time, what doesn’t? That’s what interests me.”–Elizabeth Bachinsky

Diane Tucker writes from experience and “the sustaining power of memory” in this first collection of poems. She writes of falling in love with the wrong person: “For you I ride without a seat belt, willing to be thrown clear at first impact”; her daughter at four months, whose fingertips “are globes of amber salmon roe/ cool smooth/ and salty”; and growing up as an adopted child: “mystery breathes on my bare shoulders/ whispers between my spread-eagled arms:/ you could be anyone in the whole wide world.” Tucker treats her subjects with respect, compassion and a subtle playfulness. Her love of language, humour and poetic consciousness transforms images from everyday life into lyrical, intimate and original works of art, offering the reader fresh insights – with just a touch of magic.

The spirit of the departed &#151 source, origin, heritage, history &#151 is the essence of this book, rich with the tang of Newfoundland speech.

Agnes Walsh’s first book, In the Old Country of My Heart, is one of the most read and best loved books of poetry to come out of Newfoundland. Going Around with Bachelors and Other Poems continues and extends Walsh’s distinctive subject matter: the past in the present, Ireland and Portugal in Newfoundland, weather internal and external, the Cape Shore. Here are poems of place and of people in place, of family both immediate and extended, with heritage deep and rich. They are also absolutely contemporary poems by a poet, gifted with a remarkably flexible and distinctive voice, who is planted, in her own words, “straight up and down into what’s new.” Included with the book is a CD of readings by Agnes Walsh.

If, as Robert Creeley said, “form is never more than an extension of content,” what happens when we lose form? Does content retreat into its ruins, its absences? Can we never go home because it retreats from us as relentlessly and unfathomably as our future? Is the imagination of “our” future as illusory and unreliable as the memory of “our” past? If, for the young man, “going home is the first defeat,” the first violation of a burgeoning autonomy, is the very imagination of “home” an abrogation, a transgression? These are the questions that the deceptively simple lyrics of this book ask, that we encounter as we navigate our way, “room to room” through their stanzas—from the poet’s New York childhood, his Montreal mentorship with Louis Dudek, to his volitionary adoptive “home” of Asia. The world changes in Going Home—9/11 happens. In that singular, extended historic moment all of our working models of representation on our North American Island turn to paper and dust, and now we know history always had other plans for us. The whole manufactured unreality of our world falls away in these poems, leads us both toward and away from being “at home” in the moment. “We’re all here and not here,” the poet reminds us: an index of time and the true nature of existence—a present impermanence.