By the author of The Blood Girls. Méira Cook's poetry and prose inhabit a world of fable and magic. Her cadences are primal, her language ­allusive, her subjects reminiscent of sideshow. In the prose sections, the company of bizarre includes a woman who keeps her mother's heart in the fridge, a night watchman who dresses his mannequin in the finest lingerie, and a schoolteacher who passes his days with a dead dog tied to his leg. These poems are haunting and often poignant incantations-this first collection, musical and fantastical, introduces an uncommon imagination to Canadian literature.

Méira Cook is the award-winning author of the novels The House on Sugarbush Road, which won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and Nightwatching, which won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also published five poetry collections, most recently Monologue Dogs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry and for the 2016 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. She won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2007 and the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize in 2012. In 2011 she served as Writer in Residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, and was the 2013–14 Writer in Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, she now lives in Winnipeg.

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