Animal Walk

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An ear which shapes beautifully cadenced lines and an acute eye for images distinguish this first collection from Toronto poet John O’Neill. Animal Walks is a jamboree of human voice sung in chorus with all species. O’Neill’s bear, deer, moose, rabbit and goats inhabit the borders of all to human experience, constant others at once caught and free in the play of language.

AUTHOR

John O’Neill

John O’Neill is the author of the novel Fatal Light Awareness and four poetry collections, Animal Walk, Love in Alaska, The Photographer of Wolves, and Criminal Mountains. He was raised in Scarborough, Ontario, where his parents worked for many years as building superintendents, an aspect of his history explored in The Photographer of Wolves. He was a winner in the Prairie FireLong Poem Contest and Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize, and the recipient of a ‘Maggie’ – a Manitoba Magazine Award – for Best Story for his “The Book About The Bear.” John was a finalist, with his manuscript Goth Girls of Banff (Newest Press 2020), for the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction. He taught high-school English and Dramatic Arts for 29 years, and now lives and writes in the Leslieville neighbourhood of Toronto. He and his artist wife Ann make frequent trips to Canada’s Rocky Mountains, and this landscape continues to be a major influence on his writing.