This is no typical mid-life crisis. Poet Priscila Uppal, faced with a very serious and frightening health crisis as she turned 40, reexamined her relationship to everything in her life, including her sense of what it means to heal. Thoughtfully and playfully, with Uppal's famous dark wit and intense scrutiny of the self and language, these poems debate with the tragedies and absurdities of life in the 21st century, leading Uppal to explore dramatic changes of lifestyle, philosophy, physicality, sociability, spirituality, and aesthetics. A stanch advocate of how beautiful life is even in the midst of fear and doubt, her poetry brims with hope and humour and the lust of embracing the world in its many misunderstood and even unwelcome forms of knowledge. From quantum physics and theories of creativity to energy healing and spirit trees, Uppal suggests a mid-life crisis is actually a desperate (and often comic) attempt to heal what may have gone awry and to open up to new possibilities for the future. In other words, a second lease on life goes hand in hand with second thoughts.

Dr. Priscila Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer and York University Professor. Among her publications are nine collections of poetry, most recently, Ontological Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize), Traumatology (2010), Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K.), and Winter Sport: Poems and Summer Sport: Poems; the critically-acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009); the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009), and the memoir Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother (2013; shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor General's Award). Her work has been published internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean and Latvian. She was the first-ever poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic games as well as the Roger's Cup Tennis Tournament in 2011. Six Essential Questions, her first play, had its World Premiere as part of the Factory Theatre 2013-2014 season, and will be published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015. Time Out London recently dubbed her ÒCanada's coolest poet.' For more information visit priscilauppal.ca

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