Bloodaxe Books | Karen Solie: The Living Option @BloodaxeBooks | Uploaded March 2019 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
Karen Solie won the Canadian Griffin Prize with only her third collection, PIGEON (House of Anansi), 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.
In Canada, Don McKay has praised her ‘fierce writing of quick-ness and edge that can take on just about anything: the highway, Freud, farm suicides, sturgeon, all manner of flawed and far-off romance – with candour and a trenchant humour that’s the cutting edge of intelligence. Not to mention sly skinny music, not to mention sheer metaphorical pounce, moves that accomplish themselves before you realise they’re underway.’
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw in the province of Saskatchewan, and grew up on the family farm. She initially wanted a career as a vet but dropped that plan to pursue her writing. She has published four collections in Canada.
Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed her during her visit to Newcastle to read for NCLA in October 2013. The film is from the DVD-anthology IN PERSON: WORLD POETS, filmed & edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). All the poems she reads in the film are included in her UK edition, THE LIVING OPTION: SELECTED POEMS (Bloodaxe Books, 2013): ’Sturgeon’, ‘Early in Winter’, ‘Thrasher’, Tractor’, ‘The Road In Is Not the Same as the Road Out’ and ’Spiral’. ‘The Road In Is Not the Same as the Road Out’ became the title-poem of her first collection to be published in the US (by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and by House of Anansi in Canada), THE ROAD IN IS NOT THE SAME AS THE ROAD OUT (2015). Her first two collections, SHORT HAUL ENGINE (2001) and MODERN AND NORMAL (2005) are published by Brick Books.
Karen Solie won the Canadian Griffin Prize with only her third collection, PIGEON (House of Anansi), 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.
In Canada, Don McKay has praised her ‘fierce writing of quick-ness and edge that can take on just about anything: the highway, Freud, farm suicides, sturgeon, all manner of flawed and far-off romance – with candour and a trenchant humour that’s the cutting edge of intelligence. Not to mention sly skinny music, not to mention sheer metaphorical pounce, moves that accomplish themselves before you realise they’re underway.’
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw in the province of Saskatchewan, and grew up on the family farm. She initially wanted a career as a vet but dropped that plan to pursue her writing. She has published four collections in Canada.
Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed her during her visit to Newcastle to read for NCLA in October 2013. The film is from the DVD-anthology IN PERSON: WORLD POETS, filmed & edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). All the poems she reads in the film are included in her UK edition, THE LIVING OPTION: SELECTED POEMS (Bloodaxe Books, 2013): ’Sturgeon’, ‘Early in Winter’, ‘Thrasher’, Tractor’, ‘The Road In Is Not the Same as the Road Out’ and ’Spiral’. ‘The Road In Is Not the Same as the Road Out’ became the title-poem of her first collection to be published in the US (by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and by House of Anansi in Canada), THE ROAD IN IS NOT THE SAME AS THE ROAD OUT (2015). Her first two collections, SHORT HAUL ENGINE (2001) and MODERN AND NORMAL (2005) are published by Brick Books.
