Winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize

In the Primer on the Hereafter, Steve McOrmond distills the fleeting beauties and lingering pains of daily life into darkly elegant, elegaic poems. Moving from rural to urban settings, considering the stars, music, and the inanimate objects that share our lives, McOrmond subtly examines concepts of home, loneliness, belonging and worth. With graceful lines he creates startling images and metaphors, where crows are "uneless/as 10,000 cigarettes" and a young deaf couple can "hardly pay attention to what their hands are saying." This is a compelling collection'smoky and concentrated, it lingers long in the reader's mind.

Steve McOrmond is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently The Good News About Armageddon (Brick Books, 2010), which appeared on a number of book critics' Best of 2010 lists and was shortlisted for the 2011 ReLit Award. His second collection, Primer on the Hereafter (Wolsak and Wynn, 2006), was awarded the Atlantic Poetry Prize. His debut collection, Lean Days (Wolsak and Wynn, 2004), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he lives in Toronto.

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