With a precise eye for form and a clear love for the tone and timbre of language, Steven Laird creates a profound and surreal sense of place and time, upending it all with brilliant irony. Running through this collection is a disturbing sense that even the clearest perceptions - shaped by habits of speech and thought - can be treacherous, and standing on the highest rocks is a perilous act of faith.

Steven Laird's poetry has appeared in many Canadian journals, including Descant, Event, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead and Grain, while his reviews, interviews and essays have appeared in Books in Canada, The Canadian Writers Journal, and online at Writers Block and BookNinja. A Toronto native, he is also a former resident of both Fredericton (in 1984 he was awarded the New Brunswick Writers Federation's poetry prize) and St. John's (where he served on the board of the Writers Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador). Laird is currently an editor for Lichen, a literary journal, and is at work on an anthology of very short Canadian poems. He is a resident of Oshawa, Ontario.

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