In September 2020, Arleen Paré’s almost twenty-year old grandson moved into the basement of her home to attend courses nearby. After suffering a bout of severe anxiety and depression, he was forced to drop out of his second-year computer science program after one month. In an effort to quell her own feelings of helplessness and growing anxiety about the situation, Paré turned to poetry.

In the words of Jane Munro, Paré assessed the age of anxiety with “anguished clarity”—social media, climate crisis, pandemic, addiction, inflation, depression. Both a tender tribute to a beloved grandson and an elegy for coming of age in our modern, online society, Encrypted is an honest and illuminating narrative of a life arrested and a home haunted by grief.

Eventually, her grandson was able to return, little by little, to his studies. Paré’s grandson still lives with her today.

Arleen Paré's First book, Paper Trail, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award for Poetry and won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2008. Leaving Now, a mixed-genre novel released in 2012, was highlighted on All Lit Up. Lake of Two Mountains, her third book, won the 2014 Governor General's Award for Poetry, was nominated for the Butler Book Prize and won the CBC Bookie Award. Paré's poetry collection, He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car, was a 2015 Victoria Butler Book Prize finalist. The Girls with Stone Faces, her fifth book, won the American Golden Crown Award for poetry in 2018. Her sixth book, Earle Street, was released in Spring, 2020. She lives in Victoria with her partner of forty years.

Arleen Paré's profile page

“We enter Arleen Paré’s Encrypted through the door of her twenty-year-old grandson who comes to live in their basement. In this compelling narrative poem, Paré’s intelligence, attention, kindness, love, and struggle to understand her grandson’s anxiety, depression, and night-time gaming addiction come together to create a vivid portrait of reality for a sizeable portion of youth today.”

—Jane Munro

“Arleen Paré, a poet of great range and imagination, illuminates the struggle of coming of age in this age of anxiety with poetry that charts a new course for depicting the human heart. Her language is tender, but bruised; her lines are sharp, edgy as broken glass, her words physical, palpable, turbulent as a storm at sea; she channels the demons of the ancient mariner. Encrypted enters the cyberworld of gaming and coding where Paré internalizes the dialect and dialectics of that world with a voice that is both compassionate and lyrical. Encrypted contextualizes the chaos of anxiety and depression in terms that both clarify and mollify the anguish of her helpless witnessing with poetry rich in allusions and unafraid of dark unknown spaces. Alongside books by Carson and Crozier, this collection belongs in the Canadian canon.”

—Antony Di Nardo

“A boy’s life stalls in the screen light, in the basement. Transfixed, he is ‘moonscaped,’ ‘blue diamonds,’ ‘an unsolvable dark’ in a white hoodie. A grandmother tries to fathom the potency of that digital spell, the boy’s anxious and enigmatic codes. This poem aches with not knowing how to reach someone you love. Even language is sea-tossed with helplessness. Both fearing and trusting how ‘all things will veer,’ here longing itself illumines a connection.”

—Melanie Siebert