Road In Is Not the Same Road Out

<p><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Winner of the Latner Writers' Trust Poetry Prize</strong></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Introducing Karen Solie I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: ' . . . He is quite simply the one by whom the language lives'. . . And yes as we embark on the third millennium of our so-called Common Era she is indeed the one by whom the language lives. --Michael Hofmann </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>London Review of Books</em></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>A sublime singer of existential bewilderment Karen Solie is one of contemporary poetry's most direct and haunting voices. A poet of the in-between places--the purgatory of wayside motels and junkyards the abandoned Calgary ski jump and the eternal noon of Walmart--her poems stake out startlingly new territory and are songs for our emerging world an age of uncertainty and melting icebergs.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In Solie's new collection </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)></span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>she restlessly excavates our civilization the moments of tough luck casual violence naked desire and inchoate menace pursuing Beauty and terror / in equal measure and fixing on the Intrigue of a boarded-up building. / We want to get in there and find out what's the matter with it. Amplifying the elegant recklessness of her Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Pigeon</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> these poems bear an uncanny poetic intelligence and unflinching vision.</span></p><p><br></p>