The lease is meaningless: a square paced
first by seismic workers, and then your father,
and then by every other man you know.

Distilled from his time in the Saskatchewan and Albertan oilfields, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease plumbs the prairie depths to find human technology and physical labour realigning our landscape. With acute discipline, Henderson illuminates the stubborn and often unflattering realities of industrial culture and its cast of hard-living men.

Shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013)

Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award