What if red ran out

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What if red ran out is the assured first collection from one of Canada’s finest young poets. Provocative, funny, and brash, the poems in this collection leap from one surprising image to another, from poignancy to an outlandish, teasing delight. The sheer tonal range of Grubisic’s poems is remarkable. They shimmer with playfulness yet deepen into contemplative gravity.

These street-smart poems register the pulse of contemporary commodity culture’s off-kilter pacing; “the hyena at the bodega,” as she calls it. They peer into back alleys of thought and bring forth our fears. But then, all at once, they race down the street again, laughing, reminding us of all we love and how we might hold onto it.

AUTHOR

Katia Grubisic

Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor, and translator whose work has appeared in various Canadian and international publications. Her collection What if red ran out was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and won the 2009 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book. Her translations of David Clerson’s Brothers and Alina Dumitrescu’s A Cemetery for Bees were both shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation.

Reviews

What if red ran out is the assured first collection from one of Canada’s finest young poets. Provocative, funny, and brash, these poems vault from one surprising image to another. Here is awe and elegy, recklessness and mischief.

Grubisic tracks our witching hours, peers into back alleys, and brings forward what frightens us. She lingers on the lonely and the lost, but also on the beautiful, reminding us that “when we jump fences we land as we can in our dreams, bionic.” The poems beckon, seduce; they ask what we love and how we might hold on to it.

“Every poem in this book is superb. It is the work of a major Canadian poet at the peak of her powers.”
“There is a high-minded passion to Katia Grubisic’s debut poetry collection.”
– Montreal Review of Books

“Katia Grubisic draws you into her lines like a spider on hyper-spin. I’m talking more than dazzle here: intelligence galore and an inventive streak that’s close to bliss. What if red ran out takes the ‘warped, melancholy, magnetic’ and whirls it into all sorts of jolts and leaps.”
“Here is a poetry of crackling intelligence, pastoral elegance, urban bawdiness, and — in the lines, the language, the sheer glorious stuff — abundance. Grubisic mourns and celebrates all that is tenuous in poems that are vibrantly, almost vehemently, alive. A memorable début from a writer whose voice is, already, unmistakable.”