Dazzling collection of masques from Manitoba Book of the Year and Walrus Poetry Prize?winning author.

Monologue Dogs is a series of contemporary dramatic monologues. Every "voice" has its own imagined rhythm and nuances of poetic speech that are as vibrant, wayward, mournful, errant, or unruly as the characters who speak. Setting the lyric against street argot, archaic language against deflating or ironic feints, metaphors against declarative sentences, the elegiac against the ribald, classical or literary allusions against anachronistic references, these monologues reflect our own disordered subjectivities. In the words of Molly Peacock: "Read her for a fresh, contemporary and knowing sensibility — not to mention an unforgettable sense of humour."

Suddenly the car drops down on all fours
and will go no further. Arrival is neither here
nor there, mother says, searching for her key.
But her key is in the last lost pocket of the world's
overcoat and tonight — tonight the forest is ajar.

— from "The Hunger Artists"

Praise for Monologue Dogs:

"Again Méira Cook proves herself to be one of Canada's most compelling poets." — Molly Peacock.

"These are poems to read and reread with growing pleasure and admiration." — Steven Heighton

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.

Méira Cook's profile page