From Out of Nowhere explores how cities have changed the landscape for prairie poetry. The poems find the intersections where nature speaks through cowboys, hunters, fishers, farmers, and businessmen. These voices are captured in cityscapes where they mutate, harmonize, and resonate to give new meaning to old turns of phrase, calls to actions, and directions home.

The characters here find themselves in new, sometimes confusing roles: the cowboy wakes up a street person, hunters and fishers devolve into sportsmen, and the farmer is pressed to see himself as a businessman.

In the end, From Out of Nowhere reveals that it is in our green spaces where we are reminded of our past, our present, and our uncertain future, and how we find ourselves, and our spirit, somewhere between city and country.

John Toone is a writer and business consultant. He has a BA in English and a Bachelor of Commerce, both from the University of Manitoba. His poetry has been published in Prairie Fire and dANDelion and other publications. He lives in Winnipeg with his wife and children.

John Toone's profile page

• Runner-up, John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer
• Short-listed, Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book
• Short-listed, Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry

Written in a tough-guy's one-liners, John Toone's From Out of Nowhere is a marvelous compendium of wordplay and contemporary business, political, cowboy and advertising clichés set to stagger in single broken lines.

The Dalhousie Review

From Out of Nowhere is poetry written against paperwork and the banal language of bureaucracy and control. John Toone’s phrases slip out of the rut of conventional meaning through surprising turns. This book brooks no lazy readers: instead, it fights for a fresh engagement with words and the ideas they carry.

Alison Calder, author of Wolf Tree

Winnipeg poet John Toone's debut ... has boldly emerged like a call from the shadows of the Fort Rouge bridge: swift, startling and resonant.

Jennifer Still, Winnipeg Free Press

John Toone is in the midst of perfecting the prairie roar, the long poem of multiple perspectives and precise insights. There are echoes of Cooley, Hunter, and Kroetsch in these pages. From Out of Nowhere is a relentless and exhilarating text.

Jon Paul Fiorentino, author of stripmalling