Nothing You Can Carry is rooted in a keen, even holy, sense of place within the natural world. Today that place is haunted by anxiety over a precarious present and a darker future. These poems take an honest, sometimes ironic and sometimes broken-hearted look at how the self and society are implicated in our climate crisis and the systemic complexities surrounding it.

Yet life goes on. The collection moves through environmental fears and spills into all the areas that absorb the self – memory, story, family, love.

These poems are vivid and vulnerable, humorous and emotional. They summon the deeper mysteries of being human in a world that is increasingly separate from the sacred.

Susan Alexander is the winner of the 2016 Short Grain poetry prize and the 2015 Vancouver Writers’ Festival Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in SubTerrain, Arc, CV2, Grain, Room, The Antigonish Review, and PRISM international. She is a regular at Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane’s poetry retreats. For inspiration, Alexander writes from eclectic experiences — as a chambermaid, CBC Radio journalist, stay-at-home mother, waitress, lay preacher, and associate at a boutique investment firm, as well as from her family history and passions. She is an associate member of the League of Canadian Poets

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