With her remarkable debut collection, Yukon poet Clea Roberts proffers a perceptive & ecological reading of the Canadian North’s past & present. Roberts deftly draws out the moments that comprise a cycle of seasons, paying as much attention to the natural—the winter moon’s second-hand light that pools in the tracks of tree squirrels & loose threads of migrating birds—as she does to the manufactured—the peripheral percussion of J-brakes & half-melted ice lanterns. She also casts her gaze back to the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1898, raising the voices of those marked by a frenetic race for fortune: a seductive, edgy wolf, a disillusioned photographer, and a pragmatic prostitute, among others. Here Is Where We Disembark is a beautifully crafted book that ignites the senses, and its presence lingers, like woodsmoke, long after the final page has been turned.

Clea Roberts lives in Whitehorse, Yukon. Her poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, CV2, The Dalhousie Review, The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Lake: A Journal of Arts and the Environment, The Malahat Review, Prism International, and Room. Roberts has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Centre, the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, and is a three-time recipient of the Yukon Government Advanced Artist Award. Her work has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and her poem, â??When We Begin to Grow Old,â? won the After Al Purdy Poetry Contest.

Clea Roberts' profile page

• Long-listed, ReLit Award
• Short-listed, Gerald Lampert Award
• Long-listed, Alberta Readers' Choice Award
• Short-listed, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

"Her images of the landscape and climate are not only crisp and precise, but manage to speak about the physical conditions of this place and its emotional landscape in one and the same lyrical breath… One cannot help but think of past Canadian masters when reading Roberts’ vivid portrait… Roberts writes with a rare and haunting musicality."

Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

"There is a northerly edge to Clea Roberts’ poems, and it extends past the obvious content. It has to do with exquisite frost-bitten brevities; it has to do with imagining northern space with scrupulous musically-tuned attention; and—not least—it has to do with an awareness of snow’s ‘convincing logic’, capable of pulling you ‘softly/into a ditch’ and sending explanations of ‘eider and light’. These are poems whose delight lies in seeing, and listening, afresh."

Don McKay