Anthem

Physical and fiercely lyric, Helen Humphreys’ Anthem is a litany of want. A song of poverty and of desire, of the reach forward and the relentless backward glance. With stark images and subtle, tensile strength, her poems touch that rare interval between presence and absence, echo and answer, between wall and window and sky-that gap in which we live, the space words make.

SHORTLISTED for the 2000 Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a woman published in 1999. WINNER of the 2000 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry.

AUTHOR

Helen Humphreys

Helen Humphreys is the award-winning author of four books of poetry, seven novels, and two works of creative non-fiction, including the bestselling The Frozen Thames. She has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the City of Toronto Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Reviews

“This poetry is as intellectually compelling as it is emotionally nuanced … clearly a writer at the top of her game.” Ñ Christine Wiesenthal, Canadian Literature

“With a spare elegance … Humphreys is doing what most poets only imagine doing. She takes poetry back to its bones … ” Ñ Anne Simpson, The Antigonish Review