From Governor General's Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition.

Assiniboia is a richly textured imagining of a Western Canada that could have been. Theatrical, operatic -- a masque and a pair of choral performances -- the book breaks new formal ground in Canadian poetry. The huge spectacle of Tim Lilburn's eighth collection gives us a new land peopled by figures from the visionary governments of Louis Riel and from the western mysticism, as well as land forms with the power of speech, all acting together as a kind of ghostly army bent on overturning more than a century of colonial practice.

Tim Lilburn was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He has published eight books of poetry, including To the River, Kill-site, and Orphic Politics. His work has received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for Kill-site and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award (for To the River), among other prizes. Lilburn has produced two essay collections, both concerned with poetics, eros, and politics, Living in the World as if It Were Home and Going Home, and edited two other collections on poetics, Poetry and Knowing and Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. He was a participant in the 2008 Pamirs Poetry Journey. Lilburn teaches at the University of Victoria.

Tim Lilburn's profile page

Praise for Tim Lilburn:
"Lilburn's work is richly figurative, but firmly rooted in colloquial speech. He is not only a virtuoso at the linguistic level, taking risks with metaphor and line, but also steeped in a metaphysics of place."
—Jury citation, Governor General's Award

"His long dense melodic lines are full of verve and snap, offering lightning changes in register and a reluctance to leave any part of speech unturned. . . ."
—Globe and Mail

"Striking and original. . . . [Lilburn captures] the mystical and ecstatic moments when self and world are united."
—Booklist

"Tim Lilburn brings us face to face with the beguiling, bewildering strangeness of the world."
—The Fiddlehead

"One of our more thoughtful and inventive poets."
—Quill & Quire