This Report is Strictly Confidential

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This Report is Strictly Confidential

By (author): Elizabeth Ruth

Presented in four linked sections, this debut poetry collection from award winning writer Elizabeth Ruth offers readers rare glimpses into private worlds, revealing the life of the author’s aunt who lived for decades in a notorious government-run residential hospital, exploring the experience of critical illness, and addressing the biological father Elizabeth Ruth has never met. With fresh, inventive use of language, biting irony and an unflinching gaze upon the human condition, these intimate poems give voice to the things that can’t be said. This Report Is Strictly Confidential is an act of literary alchemy that carries all kinds of secrets out of the shadows and into the light, thereby transforming ugliness into beauty.

AUTHOR

Elizabeth Ruth

Elizabeth Ruth was named one of ten Canadian women writers you need to read by the CBC. She teaches creative writing at University of Toronto. Elizabeth’s first novel, Ten Good Seconds of Silence, was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, Amazon.ca/First Novel Award, and City of Toronto Book Award. Smoke, her second novel, was chosen for the One Book, One Community program. Her third novel, Matadora, was long-listed for Canada Reads. She lives in Toronto.

Reviews

rather than writing about folx as outside normal Elizabeth Ruth gathers amp centres them understands differences as iridescent jewels amp gaudy crowns her poems repeatedly ask the reader to consider what it is not to belong they establish a path acknowledging that a lifetime trying to be herself requires that we share language amp build stories directed by Amelia Earhart arms her poems resist normative attempts at cure amp treatment moving the reader to remember our best measure is compassion

nancy viva davis halifax author ofact normalassociate professor in critical disability studies in the Faculty of Health at York University

Presented in four partsThis Report Is Strictly Confidentialsets fire to whats been hidden and blazes with beauty and cutting truths Brimming with grace acuteness and musical precision these poems are both intimate and exact and like gold weigh more than water Dedicated to the memory of Ruths auntwho spent thirty years in an institutionthis debut collection honours reveals nourishes and sustains

Catherine Graham author ofPut Flowers Around Us and Pretend Were Dead New and Selected PoemsWolsak and WynnBuckrider Books

I am greatly impressed with Elizabeths care and tenderness her generosity the sheer tenacity and overall the skill of her work in presenting this personal and social history

Maureen Hynes author ofTake the Compass