From the winner of the 2010 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award comes a remarkable debut poetry collection. In a culture that is at once desensitized by the media while it fetishizes fear and outrage, how can we talk about emergencies, both public and private in a way that still communicates their horrors, in a way that still matters? Kilby Smith-McGregor answers this question with a dizzying range of voices animated by desire, humour, pleasure and grief.

This is poetry that strikes a balance between baroque elegance and haunting understatement. In it we witness the horror of spontaneous human combustion, as well as the awkwardness of swimming lessons; the precision of code breaking, as well as the disorder of hard drinking. Effortlessly combining the languages of myth, medicine and metaphysics, Kids in Triage is rich in vivid language and arresting images, a multi-faceted feast for the imagination.

Kilby Smith-McGregor's profile page

Kilby Smith-McGregor is an ex-philosophy student who spent her early professional life making theatre. Writing across genres, she has contributed to Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Brick, Descant, The Malahat Review, The Puritan and Best Canadian Essays. Kilby won the Writers' Trust of Canada's 2010 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. She works as a freelance graphic designer in Toronto.