There are some rough and wild birds around Howe Sound - West Coast avians like the sharp-shinned hawk, the northern harrier, and the whiskey-jack. Heather Haley, an accomplished mapper of human migration, pair-bonding and predation, takes these feathered frenemies as her starting point in this assured third collection, Skookum Raven. Like her foremothers and contemporaries Gwendolyn MacEwen, Susan Musgrave and Karen Solie, Haley writes sophisticated free lyrics of a witchy feminist kind — but adds some proletarian ferocity with her bus-station grandpas and sketches of iffy guys like Ed the Fence. These are astute, austere poems which sometimes take flight into optimistic beauty - this book is "pockmarked with luck."

Heather Haley is a writer, editor, media poet, musician, and founder of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre and the Vancouver Videopoem Festival. Ms. Haley also published Rattler, a critically acclaimed multimedia arts and literary journal and her work has appeared in numerous North American publications: The Antigonish Review, The Coe Review, Northern Lights, The Literary Storefront, subTerrain, On The Bus, Catalyst, Heresies, High Performance, Verb and the Manic D Press anthology, The Verdict Is In.

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Skookum Raven is a text for the tricksters within. With spondaic pow-bams of language, these lyrics harness neologistic energies to evoke punchy lust, back alley bravado, and coastal croonings on sex, the wild, music and time. ~ Catherine Owen