Karen Solie

Biography

Karen Solie’s first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, the ReLit and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second, Modern and Normal, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous North American journals. She is a native of Saskatchewan and now lives in Toronto.

Judges’ Citation

“‘If virtue is love ordered and controlled,/its wild enemy has made a home in me. And if/desire injures the spirit, I am afflicted,’ says Karen Solie in one of Pigeon‘s finest poems, ‘An Acolyte Reads The Cloud of Unknowing.’ It’s this particular affliction of desire – and the corrosive effects of human desire both upon ourselves and the world we inhabit – that Solie most often meditates upon in poems as humorous, often, as they are sobering. ‘Gone are the bad old good old days. Before us,/vast unfenced acres of decline,’ she says in ‘Prayers for the Sick.’ Solie forces us to look squarely at that decline, the landscapes we’ve ruined, the vistas we’ve cluttered, in service to a longing that, as she puts it, ‘hovers like billboards/over the expressway.’ The vision here is powerful, philosophical, intelligent, especially adept at pulling great wisdom from the ordinary – as when a tractor is found to manifest ‘fate, forged/like a pearl around the grit of centuries.’ It may be, as Solie suggests, that ‘the honourable life/is like timing. One might not have the talent for it.’ Among the greatest of Solie’s talents, evident throughout the poems of Pigeon, is an ability to see at once into and through our daily struggle, often thwarted by our very selves, toward something like an honourable life.”

Summary

Karen Solie launched to prominence with her first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine (2001), finalist for the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize and winner of many other awards and citations. She continued her upward trajectory with Modern and Normal (2005), and is now considered one of Canada’s best poets. Pigeon is yet another leap forward for this singer of existential bewilderment. These poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love and the eros of danger. Once again, Solie shows that her ear is impeccable, her poetic intelligence rare and razor-sharp.

Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.

Karen Solie reads Migration

Migration, by Karen Solie

More about Karen Solie

The following are links to other Web sites with information about poet Karen Solie. (Note: All links to external Web sites open in a new browser window.)

• Karen Solie brief bio (House of Anansi Press)
• Canada by way of its wilderness (Globe and Mail review of Pigeon)
• The poetic world of Karen Solie (Open Book Toronto)
• John Glenday introducing Karen Solie (Arc Poetry Magazine)
• Karen Solie brief bio (Brick Books)
• Review of Short Haul Engine by Lynn Crosbie (previously on Globebooks.com)
• Don McKay introduces Karen Solie’s writing in Introductions … Poets Present Poets
• Review of Short Haul Engine in Canadian Literature

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Photo credit: Barbara Stoneham