These train poems by Pearl Pirie, the 2011 winner of the Robert Kroetch Award for Innovative Poetry, travel the rails through Quebec and Ontario with insight. There's a pleasing variety in length, tone, and style from the touching to the political with characteristic Pearl Pirie humour and sense of play. The interspersing of the fun visual poems rounds off this excellent collection.

Thirsts, denied and indulged, overt and so subtle as to beunnoticeable, have a sometimes unexamined power in our lives. thepassions we hold for one another. The poems in Thirsts descend from language, whether turns of localphrase to turns at the scrabble board. words and frames obliquelyenter and exit the heart from behind convenient foundation hedges.

Fiction. In this post-lyrical era, poems can be stories, or they can just as easily be exuberant laughter set to words, an experiment in language, or an incidental collation of plays on a Scrabble board. THE PET RADISH, SHRUNKEN, the third full collection of poetry from the inimitable Pearl Pirie, deals in the poetics of sound, language, and play. In true Pirie style, this fresh, quirky, and clear-seeing collection speaks in a range of forms and voices: From a military convoy of turtles, to a Kafkaesque conversation with a housefly, to the dissection of a fruit machine, Pirie offers oulipo found speech as it integrates and disintegrates, plays with and tumbles through language. "Quirky and fresh, playful yet serious, Pirie's collection, THE PET RADISH, SHRUNKEN, demands and activates new pathways of reason. These line-by-line lyrical segments both tantalize and take the reader down the rabbit hole (pulling rabbits out of hats along the way) with their semantic surprises and jumpy music. Pirie sees the world askew and brings the reader along for the ride. An invigorating collection."--Catherine Graham

This text is a cento of poetry & interviews by Phil Hall. Remixed by Pearl Pirie.

Ottawa poet Pearl PirieOs been shed bore, her first trade poetry collection, follows years of a small voice gaining in strength, and in volume, through so much subtle activity and quiet disconnect that by the time she was noticed, she was already everywhere, and already a confident voice. In a poetry built on the strength of play, PirieOs writing moves at the speed of sound, slipping up against silence.The poems in the collection are eccentric and perceptive. It is an examination of nation telescoping from the immediate macro view and the distance after historical calm. The combination of landscape poems and plunder makes for an original take on our world.

Inside the phobic and the crushing we trudge through the wreckage, the slippage, and the comic, in our search for joy. The beauty in these poems is an amalgam, like a gathering storm, of the meteorological and political, the mundane and the distressing.