WINNER OF THE 2025 ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN AWARD FOR POETRY

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 OTTAWA BOOK AWARD

“Where fear collides with the little shield of love.”

Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover’s growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of these poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, come, spend your precious minutes in love’s Heliotropia, where we are magnetized by the unfathomable dark matter of another person, and know ourselves as celestial bodies flowering in spacetime, together.

“Intergalactic yet deeply earthly, intertextual yet wonderfully original…”

—Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You