In these deeply humanistic poems of witness and questioning, Croatian-born poet natasha nuhanovic finds beauty and hope amid brutality and the smouldering debris of landscapes both personal and geographical. In these simply stated, sometimes surreal lullabies in reverse, it is the moment of awareness that is paramount, that difficult achievement of presence in the physical world. The poems in Stray Dog Embassy are about seeing what is in front of us: ‘Everybody talked about clouds but nobody mentioned / the old forgotten sky that shakes like a beggar.’ This collection marks the debut of a unique voice on the Canadian literary landscape.