Wellwater: Poems

Description:

Winner of the Forward Prize
Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award
Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize

A new collection of urgent, essential poems that "take your breath away" (The Daily Telegraph), from the celebrated Canadian poet Karen Solie.

The poems in Wellwater, 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.

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.

Brief description: Karen Solie grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. Her five previous collections of poetry--Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, and The Caiplie Caves--have won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and have been short-listed for the Derek Walcott Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2025, Wellwater was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Governor General's Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches half-time for the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and lives the rest of the year in Canada.

Review Quotes:

"[Solie's] knack for instilling poems with ethics never leads to hectoring, or even to preaching. Solie is thinky and sensory, serious and witty. No tendency cancels any other. . .[her] whimsical analysis, alive and alert with childhood fantasia, is also a proposition about how we might think differently -- 'The basement is a treehouse in the roots' -- as a way to reconfigure our ideas about humans' place, and plight, in the world . . . I find hope in such verbal and visionary vigor." --Daisy Fried, The New York Times

"An almost unreasonably wonderful book . . . 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 . . . as good as poetry gets." --Declan Ryan, The Telegraph

"Solie's poems are callused, yet not callous. Hard skin protecting flesh and nerve... At its worst, survival is victimhood; at best, it is intrepid accomplishment. It is the latter that Solie's poetry expresses... She writes as a generation's voice of survival." --Jim Kates, Arts Fuse

"Solie holds us to the fire of the intersection between the natural world and what we've made of it, between regret and, well, where we are." -Rebecca Morgan Frank, LitHub

"Solie's wide-ranging, exquisite latest . . . is shot through with her trademark laconic wit as she investigates 'a culture on the brink.'. . . Solie's voice and range guide the reader from a basement suite 'cold on five sides, like childhood' to a farmer's-eye view of the landscape, with a precision that regularly dazzles. This is a rare and superbly crafted volume." --Publishers Weekly