Two Eyes Are You Sleeping by Heather O'neill

Two Eyes Are You Sleeping by Heather O'neill

This is the first full-length collection of poems by Heather O'Neill, a writer and performer living in Montreal. two eyes are you sleeping is a linked collection of personal and political lyrics, written in a voice that reflects both the rootlessness and violence of the urban landscape and a metaphorical brilliance that transforms the ordinary into the visionary. These are poems of the street, poems of defenselessness, strength, perversity and generosity, poems of drug addicts, alcoholics, con-men and sexual adventurers, poems to shout out in the bathtub with the radio blaring out the song you loved when you were fourteen. Most of all they are about growing up human in the drab beauty of the city.

Heather O'Neill is a contributor to This American Life, and her writing has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times Magazine. In 2007, her international bestseller Lullabies for Little Criminals received the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Canada Reads competition, and was shortlisted for seven accolades, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and Canada's Governor General's Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her most recent work, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, was called one of the finest books of the year by various magazines and was shortlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for the 2015 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the Encore Award. She currently resides in Montreal.