Lynes distills Canada into poetry; curling, spring in Saskatoon and grape vines in Antigonish weave the country into the book. Lynes reveals a deep understanding of the country we live in and gives voices to this insight in her trademark wry and endearing style. Yet, this is her most serious collection so far, and readers everywhere will find themselves deeply identifying with a woman who "... with somewhat clouded mind, with fond / cautious affection for the farmer's wife I never was, / I stand, brush in hand, ready for ice and whatever may befall me." As she steps out onto the curling rink.

It's Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems is Jeanette Lynes` fourth collection of poetry. Her previous collections are Left Fields (Wolsak and Wynn, 2003, shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award), The Aging Cheerleader’s Alphabet (Mansfield Press, 2003), and A Woman Alone on the Atikokan Highway (Wolsak and Wynn, 1999). Her awards include the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Bliss Carman Award, and first prize in the Grain Postcard Story Competition. She has been a visiting artist / writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Northern Lights College in Dawson Creek, and the Saskatoon Public Library, as well as a faculty member of Francis Xavier University and the Sage Hill Writing Experience. She is currently co-editor of The Antigonish Review.Jeanette Lynes grew up on a farm in Alice Munro country while "Son of a Preacher Man" played on transistor radios everywhere.

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"Her language is rich and precise, and she's adept at the art of storytelling. It's grad-school life through the lens of a farm-girl history, and both aspects of Lynes's poetic obsessions bring an authenticity to the texts offered up." - The Globe and Mail

"The poems in Jeanette Lynes' fifth collection aren't sombre, twilit meditations but lively narratives on a variety of subjects, including her rural upbringing, family ties and the expectations and constraints placed on women by society." - The Toronto Star

"Jeanette Lynes is a brilliant storyteller. She borrows, steals, shapes, creates, and tells a thousand little stories in her new book The New Blue Distance?. She gives us the Canadian cultural and personal landscape in little slices of story." - Canadian Literature