Anita Lahey's second collection, Spinning Side Kick,is a hard-knuckled look at the other half. These lively poems mix a girl-about-town cockiness with an all-too-rare emotional honesty about men, love, and relationships. Whether the subject is a one-man chimney demolition, the lifelong fidelity of seahorses, a lover at war in Afghanistan or a kickboxing match, Lahey confronts the enduring disconnect between the sexes in a language that is slangy and quick, punctuated with jabs. She eyes those moments-in a day, in a life-when the normal clues we rely on disappear, shifting the line between domesticity and danger. In Spinning Side Kick, a talented poet returns with sharper aim.

Anita Lahey's poems have appeared in the Malahat Review, the Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, This Magazine, in Ottawa buses as part of the Transpoetry competition, and in The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry. She has won the Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest, Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem, and first prize for poetry in Pagitica's annual literary competition. Lahey is the editor of Arc: Canada's Poetry Magazine and lives in Montreal.

Anita Lahey's profile page

"Rapid, it renders you dizzy. Solid, it knocks you off balance. Swift and sudden, its surprises leave you winded. This is Spinning Side Kick."-The Telegraph