{"title":"Karen Solie","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"living-option-book-karen-solie-9781852249946","title":"The Living Option","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49560859476241,"sku":"GOR005652838","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52489604530449,"sku":"NLS9781852249946","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52550955401489,"sku":"CIN1852249943VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52715470749969,"sku":"NGR9781852249946","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53595239252241,"sku":"GOR014974068","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852249943.jpg?v=1776247007"},{"product_id":"caiplie-caves-book-karen-solie-9781529005325","title":"The Caiplie Caves","description":"Karen Solies fifth poetry collection, The Caiplie Caves, is a profound and timely consideration of the nature of crisis.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49613098320145,"sku":"GOR010128838","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49735693893905,"sku":"NGR9781529005325","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49948428435729,"sku":"CIN1529005329G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50387871564049,"sku":"CIN1529005329VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1529005329.jpg?v=1750718603"},{"product_id":"pigeon-book-karen-solie-9780887848230","title":"Pigeon","description":"\u003cp\u003eKaren Solie launched to prominence with her first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine(2001), finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and winner of many other awards and citations. She continued her upward trajectory with Modern and Normal(2005), and is now considered one of Canada's best poets.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePigeon is yet another leap forward for this singer of existential bewilderment. These poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love, and the eros of danger. Once again, Solie shows that her ear is impeccable, her poetic intelligence rare and razor-sharp.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50286140522769,"sku":"GOR007963706","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009532166417,"sku":"NIN9780887848230","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0887848230.jpg?v=1751139735"},{"product_id":"road-in-is-not-the-same-road-out-book-karen-solie-9780374536169","title":"The Road in Is Not the Same Road Out","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003eLatner Writers\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e'\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003eTrust Poetry Prize\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"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, \u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eA 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In Solie's new collection, \u003ci\u003eThe Road In Is Not the Same Road Out\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003ePigeon\u003c\/i\u003e, these poems bear an uncanny poetic intelligence and unflinching vision.\u003c\/p\u003e esire, 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 \u003ci\u003ePigeon\u003c\/i\u003e, these poems bear an uncanny poetic intelligence and unflinching vision.esire, 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 \u003ci\u003ePigeon\u003c\/i\u003e, these poems bear an uncanny poetic intelligence and unflinching vision.esire, 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 \u003ci\u003ePigeon\u003c\/i\u003e, these poems bear an uncanny poetic intelligence and unflinching vision.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50469164286225,"sku":"CIN0374536163G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51001855443217,"sku":"NIN9780374536169","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51444125106449,"sku":"GOR013355142","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374536163.jpg?v=1750845643"},{"product_id":"caiplie-caves-book-karen-solie-9780374117962","title":"The Caiplie Caves","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe award-winning poet Karen Solie's striking fifth collection of poetry blends the story of a seventh-century monk with contemporary themes of economic class, environmentalism, and solitude in an ever-connected world\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eif one asks for a sign\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003emust one accept what's given?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Ethernan, an Irish missionary in the seventh century, retreated to the Caiplie Caves on the eastern coast of Scotland to consider life as a hermit. In \u003ci\u003eThe Caiplie Caves\u003c\/i\u003e, Karen Solie's fifth collection of poems, short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, Solie inhabits a figure inspired by Ethernan, a man torn between the communal and the contemplative. His story is remarkable for the mysticism embedded in the ordinary; as Solie writes in her preface, Ethernan is not known for supernatural feats, but \"is said to have survived for a very long time on bread and water.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Interwoven with the voice of this figure are poems whose subjects orbit the physical location of the caves and join the sharply contemporary to the mythic past: the fall of a coal-fired power station; a \"druid shouting astrology\" outside a liquor store, putting \"the Ambien in ambience\"; seabirds \"frontloaded with military tech\"; the dichotomous nature of the stinging nettle.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e These are meditations on the crisis of time and change, on class, power, and belief. Above all, these are ambitious and exhilarating poems from one of today's most gifted poetic voices.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50761910518033,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50761912123665,"sku":"CIN0374117969G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374117969.jpg?v=1751260093"},{"product_id":"modern-and-normal-book-karen-solie-9781894078474","title":"Modern and Normal","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eModern and Normal\u003c\/i\u003e, Karen Solie takes her on-the-road fascination with being between places to a new level, exploring conceptual and perceptual states of in-betweenness.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFor example, between what is perceived and what is actually there, or between and among the patterns the world repeats from the cell to the structure of the universe--to find points of intersection. Solie finds a middle ground between the discourses of the hard sciences and the intuitive, a realm of weird overlap wherein lie questions of probability, fate, determinism, chance, luck, and faith. She writes about fractals and physics, but also about bar bands, broken hearts, and the trappings of desire. Some splendid landscape poems celebrate nature while mourning the way in which it's often exploited and used. Once again Karen Solie offers readers her lovely dexterity and skill in poems which entertain as they move.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"Evade your eye. Try to see as others do\u003cbr\u003e what is desired or refused. What went wrong.\u003cbr\u003e Or right, then wrong. Objectively, what hangs.\u003cbr\u003e Pull yourself together. Years are neither kind\u003cbr\u003e nor cruel. You drag on. The girl is gone.\u003cbr\u003e Consider that it might be time to call in\u003cbr\u003e a professional. Blood is fearless, runs\u003cbr\u003e to meet a touch, indiscriminate, remembering\u003cbr\u003e the first time it fell in love with the world, unaware\u003cbr\u003e that now you are alone.\"\u003cbr\u003e --From \"Mirror\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51383796433169,"sku":"NIN9781894078474","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51734808756497,"sku":"CIN1894078470VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53130272964881,"sku":"CIN1894078470A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1894078470.jpg?v=1769509109"},{"product_id":"short-haul-engine-book-karen-solie-9781894078177","title":"Short Haul Engine","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2002 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWINNER OF THE 2002 DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY AWARD\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eKaren Solie takes risks with perception and language, risks that pay off in such startling ways that it's hard to believe this is a first book.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eShort Haul Engine\u003c\/i\u003e is one great twist of fate and fury after another. The writing is clear, striking and open to all sorts of possibilities. Even at their most playful, these poems dive much deeper than initially expected. There's a remarkably dark sense of humour at work here, but tempered with a haunting vulnerability that makes even the sharpest lines tremble.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"Too delicate for these dog-days, small, clover-blonde, my sister sews indoors. I ask her to fashion me into something nice, ivory silk. I am a big girl, sunburnt skin like raw meat, sweating two pews in front of the Blessed Virgin\"--from \"Signs Taken for Wonders\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51383796269329,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51383797154065,"sku":"NIN9781894078177","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1894078179.jpg?v=1769508220"},{"product_id":"wellwater-book-karen-solie-9781035048182","title":"Wellwater","description":"The Forward Prize-winning collection by Karen Solie, a poet 'by whom the language lives'","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51598958657809,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51598958854417,"sku":"NGR9781035048182","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51727826780433,"sku":"GOR014380442","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52111822094609,"sku":"GOR014490099","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52670868947217,"sku":"NLS9781035048182","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1035048183.jpg?v=1761141020"},{"product_id":"caiplie-caves-book-karen-solie-9780374602895","title":"The Caiplie Caves","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe award-winning poet Karen Solie's striking fifth collection of poetry blends the story of a seventh-century monk with contemporary themes of economic class, environmentalism, and solitude in an ever-connected world\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eif one asks for a sign\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003emust one accept what's given?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Ethernan, an Irish missionary in the seventh century, retreated to the Caiplie Caves on the eastern coast of Scotland to consider life as a hermit. In \u003ci\u003eThe Caiplie Caves\u003c\/i\u003e, Karen Solie's fifth collection of poems, short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, Solie inhabits a figure inspired by Ethernan, a man torn between the communal and the contemplative. His story is remarkable for the mysticism embedded in the ordinary; as Solie writes in her preface, Ethernan is not known for supernatural feats, but \"is said to have survived for a very long time on bread and water.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Interwoven with the voice of this figure are poems whose subjects orbit the physical location of the caves and join the sharply contemporary to the mythic past: the fall of a coal-fired power station; a \"druid shouting astrology\" outside a liquor store, putting \"the Ambien in ambience\"; seabirds \"frontloaded with military tech\"; the dichotomous nature of the stinging nettle.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e These are meditations on the crisis of time and change, on class, power, and belief. Above all, these are ambitious and exhilarating poems from one of today's most gifted poetic voices.\u003c\/p\u003e contemporary to the mythic past: the fall of a coal-fired power station; a \"druid shouting astrology\" outside a liquor store, putting \"the Ambien in ambience\"; seabirds \"frontloaded with military tech\"; the dichotomous nature of the stinging nettle.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e These are meditations on the crisis of time and change, on class, power, and belief. Above all, these are ambitious and exhilarating poems from one of today's most gifted poetic voices.contemporary to the mythic past: the fall of a coal-fired power station; a \"druid shouting astrology\" outside a liquor store, putting \"the Ambien in ambience\"; seabirds \"frontloaded with military tech\"; the dichotomous nature of the stinging nettle.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e These are meditations on the crisis of time and change, on class, power, and belief. Above all, these are ambitious and exhilarating poems from one of today's most gifted poetic voices.contemporary to the mythic past: the fall of a coal-fired power station; a \"druid shouting astrology\" outside a liquor store, putting \"the Ambien in ambience\"; seabirds \"frontloaded with military tech\"; the dichotomous nature of the stinging nettle.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e These are meditations on the crisis of time and change, on class, power, and belief. Above all, these are ambitious and exhilarating poems from one of today's most gifted poetic voices.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52101311168785,"sku":"CIN0374602891VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52755344752913,"sku":"CIN0374602891G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53587545555217,"sku":"NIN9780374602895","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780374602895.jpg?v=1779875616"},{"product_id":"wellwater-book-karen-solie-9780374617677","title":"Wellwater","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Forward Prize\u003cbr\u003e Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award\u003cbr\u003e Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize\u003cbr\u003e Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A new collection of urgent, essential poems that \"take your breath away\" (\u003ci\u003eThe Daily Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e), from the celebrated Canadian poet Karen Solie.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e The poems in \u003ci\u003eWellwater\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53437794844945,"sku":"NIN9780374617677","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53450452631825,"sku":"NGR9780374617677","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780374617677.jpg?v=1779876212"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-karen-solie.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}