Praise for Lullabies in the Real World:

“Meredith Quartermain’s new collection of poems … puts colonization under the literary microscope.”
~BC BookWorld

“While imagining a time before or without colonization, the collection also challenges colonizing literatures such as the Odyssey, along with various British and U.S. voices that make up the literary canon.”
~ CBC Books

“Quartermain delights in wordplay, rhythm and rhyme, although she never holds any of these for long, making the poems musical and wild even as they refuse to stay still for too long… Despite her dark materials, Quartermain’s poems gleam.”
~ Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press“This is a kind of anti-epic, challenging and provocative.”
~ Barbara Carey, Toronto Star

“Playful and serious, waving to bpNichol, Robin Blaser, and Homer, Meredith Quartermain questions and elicits the classic cross-Canada poetic journey. Her cut-ups and substantiations, echoes and plot decoys, rhythmic clickings, bilanguaged mashups and toponomastic calibrations bring us a joyous un-epic, full of Learning Coordinators, museums, watercourses, city streets, and the inside/outside of identity and weather, historical and new.”
~ Erín Moure, award-winning author of The Elements

“Meredith Quartermain torques the fabric of language to move us across the Canadian landscape between train tracks, tanneries, and graffiti tags with the rhythm of a dancing ear and a flaneuse’s critical eye. These are poems made of breath, rifts, and music, at once impressionistic and precise. They unsettle history and make us party.”
~ Shazia Hafiz Ramji, author of Port of Being

“Ride the Quartermain line. Steam across Canada on the milkiest of runs with this guide, alert always to the particular ecological, historical, and literary strata of places. With language as its engine, Lullabies goes irrepressibly off the rails at every turn, and in those detours shows us where we live.”
~ Susan Holbrook, author of Throaty Wipes

“In Lullabies in the Real World, Meredith Quartermain takes us ‘backwards,’ by train, along the literal tracks laid down by the colonial enterprise that made Canada. Her poems shush and clunk to us as we move across over-storied territories, not to lull us to sleep but to wake us out of false knowing. Her sound-songs challenge our attachment to colonial place names and histories, spinning new yarns of possibility to unknow, unremember and unharm. Quartermain’s earnest unmappings help us imagine a futurity ‘before sixty-second minutes,’ in fuller harmony with the lands’ long histories.”
~ Sonnet L’Abbé, author of Sonnet’s Shakespeare