There is the heartbreak tied to human love and there is heartbreak that points to notions of the divine. The poems in Suzanne Buffam's debut collection, Past Imperfect, enter the darkness of both -- at times simultaneously -- giving utterance to the breakage and shards of weak light found therein. Employing humour and directness to equal effect, Past Imperfect admits the self is fluid; so we wave farewell to many selves.

These are poems of great intensity, driven by intelligence, tracing the barely knowable contours of a soul-in-progress. In a voice as confident, elegant, and vivid as it is brimming with doubt, Past Imperfect employs recurrent images like echoes or quiet obsessions. These become totems of absence, of presence, of the potential other, or simply, of the world as it is: breathtakingly beautiful, refusing to minister to our solitude.

Suzanne Buffam' first collection of poetry, Past Imperfect, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for Poetry, was named a Globe and Mail "Top 100" Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the ReLit Award. She won the 1998 CBC Literary Award for Poetry and has twice been shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has appeared in various literary magazines and journals in the United States and Canada, including Books in Canada, Poetry, Jubilat, A Public Space, The Canary, The Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and The Colorado Review. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Language Matters, Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets and Breaking the Surface. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Master's program in English at Concordia University, she currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

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