Wellwater by Karen Solie

Wellwater by Karen Solie

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize
Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
An Observer, Telegraph, TLS, Guardian, Scotsman, New Statesman, Financial Times and Irish Times Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize

Wellwater demonstrates a poet writing at the height of her powers. In poems that are supple, philosophical, bracingly honest and ribbed with erudition, Wellwater conducts a self-interrogative conversation with a culture in crisis and a natural world on the brink. Thresholds abound, ‘doors between dimensions’ where past selves or lost loved ones speak to us again: ‘death is not Saskatchewan’ shrugs one encountered soul, ‘we don’t all know each other in this place’.

Solie excels as a laureate of the transitory, of ‘baffling flats . . . tiny museums of illegalities’, motel rooms exuding a ‘low hum of menace’. Her roving, syntactically elegant poems will often resolve in disarming directness, a precise admission of the emotional stakes. Karen Solie is increasingly recognised as one of the essential voices in world poetry. Wellwater will delight those already in the know, while new readers of her work will be astonished.

'Solie is an essential writer . . . anyone remotely interested in 21st-century literature, or 21st-century life, should read her' – Tristram Fane Saunders, Telegraph

'Powerful, philosophical, intelligent . . . [Solie is] adept at pulling great wisdom from the ordinary' – Griffin Prize judges Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie and Carl Phillips

'A work of political profundity and linguistic dexterity that constantly surprises.' – Susannah Dickey, PEN Heaney Prize-winning author of ISDAL and Tennis Lessons

'Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken' – Michael Hofmann, LRB

'Half-expertise and half-magic . . . Wellwater is a terrifying book – and a masterly one. Solie is as good as poetry gets' – Declan Ryan, Telegraph

An almost unreasonably wonderful book. . Solie is a brilliant cartographer of the feckless and the careless, of the ways in which inhumanity has an impact on the minutiae of our daily lives . . . Half-expertise and half-magic . . . Solie is an exquisite phrasemaker, analogist, blender of idioms, aphorist – and all these overlapping gifts create images, phrases, whole poems that take your breath away . . . Wellwater is a terrifying book – and a masterly one. Solie, for me, is as good as poetry gets -- Declan Ryan * Telegraph *
Her expansive, talkative lines unpack tight domestic spaces jam-packed with childhood memories as well as the awesome vistas of vast, dust-filled Canadian landscapes. Sometimes didactic and anecdotal, always matter-of-fact, Solie is a philosophical conversationalist . . . This is a well-timed book addressing our moment of climatic turbulence -- Kit Fan * Observer *
Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken -- Michael Hofmann * London Review of Books *
Powerful, philosophical, intelligent . . . [Solie is] especially adept at pulling great wisdom from the ordinary -- Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, and Carl Phillips * Griffin Poetry Prize Judges' Citation *
A poet of the modern, cross-country journey * Guardian *
Karen Solie is a star of Canadian poetry -- Ange Mlinko * New York Review of Books *
Karen Solie's Wellwater is brilliant - one of my favourite collections of recent times. Blending the incompatible lexicons of the corporate and the non-human, Solie denaturalises the schemas of land and property ownership, rendering strange that which is all too frequently taken to be normal. A wry and buoyant playfulness walks a tightrope with frank appraisal, as Solie details our growing alienation to the natural world. The result is a work of political profundity and linguistic dexterity that constantly surprises -- Susannah Dickey, PEN Heaney Prize-winning author of ISDAL and Tennis Lessons

Karen Solie grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. She is the author of six collections of poetry – Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, The Caiplie Caves and Wellwater – which have won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Dorothy Livesay Award, Pat Lowther Award, Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Griffin Prize, and been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize. The Living Option: Selected Poems, was published in the UK in 2013. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, Karen Solie teaches half-time for the University of St Andrews in Scotland and lives the rest of the year in Canada. Wellwater is her sixth collection.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781035048182
ISBN 10	1035048183
Title	Wellwater
Author	Karen Solie
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Pan Macmillan
Year published	2025-04-24
Number of pages	112
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.