Wellwater: Poems

Winner of the Forward Prize
Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award
Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize

A new collection of urgent, essential poems that “take your breath away” (The Daily Telegraph), from the celebrated Canadian poet Karen Solie.

The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solie’s sixth collection, explore the cultural, economic, and personal ideas of “value,” addressing housing, economic and environmental crises, and aging and its incumbent losses. Places we might think of as home have become unaffordable or inaccessible. A poor excuse for an apartment, a basement suite is “cold on five sides, like childhood,” and “tries to forget we are here.” Power lines, radios, and fluorescent lights all emit a “low hum of menace,” and “vulgar muffins, overstuffed as geese with funnels down their throats” come to represent a culture in decline.

Solie, who grew up in Saskatchewan on a small family farm, sees the economic and environmental crises as intertwined. Climate change has made small farming untenable, and onward creeps the corporate control of food production. “There is no starting over,” Solie writes. And yet, life, echoing with the presence of those lost, ambles along day by day.