Writing about ruins, compost, regeneration and football, Alison Calder explores the ways we learn, or invent, to feel our way through new experiences. Alison Calder's poetry is known for shining the light of the poet's curiosity on all manner of "natural occurrences," which nevertheless stand out. Again, as with her first book, Wolf Tree, this collection is about what exists at the edges of human experience, what's out there but is largely unseen by the average human being - animals; the line a receiver makes running down a football field; the calligraphy of pheasant wings in the snow. It's about ghosts, how these things operate as ghosts to us now, in this age - things that might have, in another age, occupied a more central place in our lives.

Alison Calder’s first poetry collection, Wolf Tree, won two Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert Award and the Pat Lowther Award for Canadian poetry. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, most notably Breathing Fire:Canada’s New Poets and Exposed, and has twice circulated on Winnipeg city buses.She is the editor of Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007) and a critical edition of Frederick Philip Grove’s 1924 novel Settlers of the Marsh (Borealis, 2006), and the co-editor of History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies (University of Manitoba Press, 2005).Born in England, Alison Calder grew up in Saskatoon and now lives in Winnipeg, where she teaches Canadian Literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba.

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