The celebrated poet hailed by Ursula K. Le Guin as a "storyteller, truth-teller, and visionary" gives us a mesmerizing new collection of poems that are funny, wise, moving, and surprising.How many gods can dance on the head of Lorna Crozier's pen? The poet Lorna Crozier has, for some time, been offering her readers glimpses into the strange corners of her personal cosmologies. Now the Governor General's Literary Award-winning author of Inventing the Hawk returns with God of Shadows, a wryly wise book that offers a polytheistic gallery of the gods humanity never knew existed and didn't know it needed. To read these poems is to be ready to offer your own prayers to the god of shadows, the god of quirks, and the god of vacant houses. Sing new votive hymns to the gods of horses, birds, cats, rats, and insects. And give thanks at the altars of the gods of doubt, guilt, and forgetting.      What profound question have...

National-award-winning poet Lorna Crozier's new collection of poems are peopled by the seasons and their elements, her beloved prairies, sorrow, joy, and the dead. Central to their themes are revisitations of family and marriage, and the land-death that is drought. Universal, deeply moving, crowded with breathtaking imagery, these are darkly resonant poems of middle age: alert to the beauty in loss, cherishing the humanity that is whetted on that stone. This is Lorna Crozier, one of Canada's most highly celebrated poets, at the top of her form.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Small Beneath the Sky is a tender, unsparing portrait of a family. It is also a book about place. Growing up in a small prairie city, where the local heroes were hockey players and curlers, Lorna Crozier never once dreamed of becoming a writer. Nonetheless, the grace, wisdom, and wit of her poetry have won her international acclaim. In this marvelous volume of recollections, she charts the geography that has shaped her character and her sense of home.Crozier vividly depicts her hometown of Swift Current, with its one main street, its two high schools—the one on top of the hill was for the wealthy kids—and its three beer parlors, where her father spent most of his evenings. She captures crystal moments from her childhood—delivering newspapers with her brother in the blue-snow light of a winter morning, planting potatoes under a pale full moon, enjoying an illicit night swim in the town's public pool. She writes unflinchingly, too, about the grief and...