Short Haul Engine

by Karen Solie

Overview

Winner of the 2002 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes), shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award for first book and longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards. Karen 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. Short Haul Engine 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781926829425
Publisher:	Brick Books
Publication date:	09/15/2001
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	84
Sales rank:	824,295
File size:	847 KB

About the Author

Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and raised in southwest Saskatchewan. Her first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine, won the BC Book Prize Dorothy Livesay Award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Gerald Lampert Award, and the ReLit Award. She lives in Toronto.

Editorial Reviews

"There is toughness here, as well as grace. Often in her pages we encounter wisdom of a severity that we would almost rather not know. A cold person is a different species; there is a dismal companionship in grief, the water stays in the fish, even when the fish is out of water. Short Haul Engine is not just an exceptional debut, it is an exceptional book."
- from the Judge's Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize 2002

"Solie's voice is polished and original...An enviable, accomplished collection."
- Lynn Crosbie, The Globe and Mail

"Karen Solie's work reminds me that at the heart of metaphor there is a deep, amoral joy..."
Don McKay, Introductions: Poets Present Poets (Fitzhenry and Whiteside)

Solie's poetry shares a great deal with the work of her contemporaries; writers like George Murray, Ken Babstock, and Paul Vermeersch convey a similar sense of localism, of guarded confessionalism, and of the poem as a meditative narrative. Solie continues and expands their explorations of Canadian consciousness, not as a derivative follower but as a peer."
Jack Illingworth

"The language in this debut collection is spare and direct, blown clean of sentiment and nostalgia, like the prairie landscapes about which she writes. Perhaps it is partly because of her short, clean lines and simple forms that her poetry seems to drive toward a sense of vast, stark loneliness and restlessness that is, at the same time, beautiful"
- Heather Fitzgerald, Quill & Quire

From the Publisher