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We Can't Ever Do This Again
By Amber McMillan
Honourable Mention - Alcuin Society Award for Excellence in Book Design - Poetry
A blind boy comforts himself with a telephone's dial tone and later becomes an international prankster. The discovery of a fox crucified in a toolshed prefigures the breakdown of a close relationship. ... Read more
Overview
Honourable Mention - Alcuin Society Award for Excellence in Book Design - Poetry
A blind boy comforts himself with a telephone's dial tone and later becomes an international prankster. The discovery of a fox crucified in a toolshed prefigures the breakdown of a close relationship. McMillan's poems render both the public and the intimate with uncanny precision. They show us how these two worlds influence and invade one another. The flux and flicker of private memories are captured and projected brightly onto a shared, communal space. This is an adroit poetry that moves beyond confession; rather, it first stands witness, and then records, and then transmits its experiences to us like a gift.
Amber McMillan
Amber McMillan is the author of the short story collection The Running Trees, the memoir The Woods: A Year on Protection Island and the poetry collection We Can’t Ever Do This Again. She has won a Penguin Random House award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Maisonneuve, Arc, Global Poetry Anthology, Room, The Walrus and other publications across North America. She lives in New Brunswick.
Reviews
"Few debuts are as considered as Amber McMillan?s We Can?t Ever Do This Again. The new collection from Buckrider Books walks a calculated line, navigating family and history, tenderness and indifference, without a false step to either side. McMillan?s landscape is washed up pilot whales and lamed cows, broken dishware and dial tones, sprawling Canada and specific Zutphen, Second World War. The collection is a precipice book, a welcome jolt of adrenaline as McMillan peers into the human condition and does not fall. " - Arc Poetry Magazine
"McMillan can move masterfully between Larkin-y lines ? and joyfully tragic linguistic lollopings. " - Marrow Reviews
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You may be maxxin' and relaxin' today for Victoria Day, but don't get too casual and risk missing one of the great lit events going on Canada-wide this week.
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Writer's Block: Nathaniel G. Moore's Savage Scrapbook
- Dimensions 79 pages, 5.78 x 8.50 x .30 in
- Published April 15, 2015
- Publisher Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd.
- Category Poetry
- Keywords Canadian
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