A powerful diptych juxtaposing our rootedness in family love with a report from the precipice of planetary disintegration.

Sue Goyette's outskirts is a tour de force. Its originality lies in Goyette's refusal of despair, her conviction that the connections among people, their conversation, curiosity, empathy and awe, can help us see a way forward. Her aim is to find energy in human love, a way to walk the darkness rather than hide from it. This book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and arm you for what is to come.

... Leave the gossip to the rivers. Photographs will be buried at the base of diseased trees. All eyes are distractible, smiles are especially alluring. The sump-pump

can't get rid of the water and god, I am told, is a canoe-shaped hole in all of us. Books, those old grandmothers, are losing their teeth. Stay focused. Those aren't stars, they're

flashlights. Add, don't divide. Love best those who have forgotten how. There are no favorites in this dark. Now scatter.

— from "Resist"

Sue Goyette has published nine books of poems and a novel. Her collections include The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, Penelope and Ocean (for which she was awarded the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017) and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and German and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spraypainted on a sidewalk and tattooed. She was nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several national awards including the Pat Lowther Award, the Bliss Carman Award, and the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry. She is the Artist in Residence in the Max Rady College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba and Poet Laureate for Halifax Regional Municipality. She lives in Halifax (K'jipuktuk) where she teaches in the creative writing at Dalhousie University.

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