In Electric Affinities, Michael Pacey's second collection, everyday household items become points of departure into wonder -- a handsaw becomes a “bird hooded, strung with jesses, strops with its beak.” A cup becomes “a tool for gripping liquids.” Mirrors are “windows turned inside out, always concentrating, trying to memorize each detail” and scissors are “Perpetually plural, twin sisters fastened together.” While it is Pacey’s particular magic to discover the amazing alchemical properties of everyday objects, in Electric Affinities he also illuminates the poetic “current” that connects them to larger questions of human nature, language and the environment.

Michael Pacey has been a fixture of Fredericton's literary scene for more than fifty years, publishing his early poems in The Fiddlehead while still in high school, and his first collection with New Brunswick Chapbooks while a sophomore at UNB. He did his MFA in Creative Writing at UBC where he served as editor-in-chief of Prism International (1984-85).

In recent years he has produced four collections: The First Step and Electric Affinities (2011 and 2015, both from Signature Editions) and Wild Apples: a Dialogue with Thoreau (Pottersfield Press, 2022). The latter two collections were shortlisted for the Fiddlehead Prize at the annual New Brunswick Book Awards. More than a hundred of Michael's poems have appeared in Canadian literary magazines, and his poems have twice been recognized in the Best Canadian Poems in English series.

Michael Pacey's profile page