Living Option
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Karen Solie won the Canadian Griffin Prize with only her third collection, Pigeon, in 2010, and has quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive and unsettling voices in Canadian poetry, a 'sublime singer of existential bewilderment'. Her poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love, desire, and the eros of danger, constantly exposing the fragility of the basis of trust on which modern humanity relies. They are double-edged, tense and tender, an edgy blend of irony and guts, of snarl and praise, of sharp intelligence and quizzical ambiguity. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw in the province of Saskatchewan, and now lives in Toronto. She initially wanted a career as a vet but dropped that plan to pursue her writing. Her first publication, in 1995, was in a prestigious anthology, Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets. This was followed in 2001 by her first collection, Short Haul Engine, from Brick Books, awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and shortlisted for three other prizes, including the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2005 she published her second collection with Brick, Modern and Normal, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her third collection, Pigeon, published by Anansi in 2009, won her the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, Pat Lowther Award and Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She was International Writer-in-Residence at the University of St Andrews in 2011, is an Associate Director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio program in Banff, Alberta, and took part in Poetry Parnassus at London's Southbank Centre in 2012. Her poems have been published across Canada, in the US, UK, and Europe, and have been translated into French, German, Korean and Dutch. Her first UK edition, The Living Option: Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013. All the new poems in the Bloodaxe edition have since been published in North America in a new collection, The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out (Anansi, Canada; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, US, 2015). Her latest collection is The Caiplie Caves (House of Anansi, Canada; Picador, UK, 2019).