In Attic Rain, her debut poetry collection, Calgary based poet and writer Samantha Jones puts obsessive-compulsive disorder centre stage. Lines and words repeat, write over themselves, and read top to bottom and back again, emphasizing themes of self-doubt, anxiety, and negotiation for control. Attic Rain, is a love story nested inside an overarching narrative of self-compassion and awareness. It tours childhood and adulthood, lingering on settings and scenarios typically considered ordinary and unremarkable. The poems in this collection are part of an ongoing act of resilience and an honest account of moving through a world obsessed with normality.

Samantha Jones is an earth scientist, writer, and copyeditor based in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary, Alberta). Her chapbook, Site Orientation, is available from the Blasted Tree, and her writing appears in Room, THIS, CV2, GeoHumanities, Arctic, EVENT, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Calgary.

Samantha Jones' profile page

"Never have I read a poetry collection quite like this! Attic Rain is artful, intimate, and original in its exploration of OCD. Each poem and illustration offers the reader palpable panic and delight." -Farzana Doctor, award-winning, author of The Beauty of Us and You Still Look The Same

"Samantha Jones speaks with a strong new voice in these poems about her lived experience of neurodivergence, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and climate change, and the impact of a shifting world on all who rely on stability and patterns to retain a crucial feeling of safety. Self-reflective, wry, intelligent, and vulnerable, Attic Rain is a brave debut collection from a brilliant writer to watch." -Jenna Butler, award-winning author of Seldom Seen Road and Revery: A Year of Bees

"I could say you'll return again and again to Attic Rain because in these poems Samantha Jones returns again and again to check that everything is ok. I won't but if I did, it would reflect her deft wit and formal inventiveness. She writes with a lightness which belies the implicit pain of the experience of OCD. With self-awareness, energy and agency, she transforms anxiety-motivated repetition into the music of poetry and creates quirky diagrams which map the difficult routes of her OCD with insight. This is a book that isn't afraid to record and appreciate the strange, challenging and absurd delight of being human." -Gary Barwin award-winning author of Scandal at the Alphorn Factory

"Attic Rain is a raw poetic map, a song of compulsion, a charting of what it means to live in and see the world as someone called upon to check and then check again. If Psychiatry's single greatest reference point, the DSM 5 Handbook, could have a heart, it would be Attic Rain. If Faculties of Medicine ever wanted to teach truly patient-centred caring, they'd use Attic Rain as a textbook. Attic Rain demands second looks, double and triple trips: this is poetry that wears thin a path in your carpet as you trace and retrace all the book has to offer." -Sarah de Leeuw, award-winning author of Geographies of a Lover