Reviews
“‘We drag the future through every hesitant hour, / scrabbling for safe places to grow fragile things.’ Englert is the loving curator of our peculiarities and vulnerabilities, giving a radically empathetic behind-the-scenes tour of the magpie museum of memory. Weaving a heady dark magic, like having your blood drawn by a gently mesmerizing vampire, The Lost Time Accidents bares the body’s interior beauty with reverence for its mysteries. These poems are bewitching post-apocalyptic love songs from the Island of Misfit Toys, a lost map to a secret garden, the fossilized remains of fabulous sea creatures, a crystalline curiosity cabinet of rare spun glass insects, the difference engine of alternate history and histology, an autopsy by gaslight of the heavy human heart. With painterly vision and precise language, Englert makes new the world, knowing that ‘To find what’s left of our names, / these rock bellies must be broken open.’”
“Singular in vision and capacious in range, this book is a dazzling cauldron of uncanny apparitions and bewildering life. Whale hearts and hunger stones, plastic rivers and taxidermied bees, synthetic wombs and dinner party mannequins — here is a trove of unusual voices wrought with agility, poise, and care. Equally adept in the plasticized, the chemical, and the creaturely, Englert crafts backstitched requiems for the copious lost.”
“Beautiful, haunting, psychological and vividly real all at once, Englert’s The Lost Time Accidents is definitely worth the read.”
– The Manitoban
“The poems in this debut full-length collection reveal slights of hand, the inner workings of an acute sensibility, and so much more in a series of improbable accidental disclosures.”
– The Prairie Journal
“Englert is willing to confront the inevitability of death and decomposition of the physical body, and yet she still imagines a future in which the traces of a person never truly disappear. … Her collection is a journey in many different registers, and her elegance and her nuanced, vulnerable vision make it a truly moving book.”
– Acta Victoriana
“The Lost Time Accidents demonstrates an obvious mastery of language, imagery, and literary devices. Gorgeously executed and obviously queer, each poem in the collection is a triumph.”
– Lesbrary
“Englert’s poems exist as echoes of folk tales or fables, offering her takes that thread a particular truth or deep wisdom through its narrative quilt. Hers is a surrealism that enters the room like smoke, providing a quiet use of space and rhythm.”
– Dusie, “Best 2021 Canadian poetry books”