Standstill takes us on a journey through Ohio’s two-thousand-year-old Hopewell Earthworks, which include the largest geometric earthworks in the world. But these are also the landscapes of a writer who lives in the present. Rice’s evocative stories show us art that has saved lives—sometimes hundreds of lives—and a social history of those who literally have lost their power of speech. These are scenes that affirm the best that is in us and the persistence of beauty, which he says is stronger than we think and outlives us all.

Bruce Rice is a previous Saskatchewan Poet Laureate, an essayist, and editor. His writing moves from family and community to social history and meditations on landscape and wilderness. Bruce’s six books of poetry have received two Saskatchewan Book Awards and a Saskatchewan Book of the Year nomination. His first book, Daniel, won the Canadian Authors Association Award. Judges said it “portrays life’s hardships with an elegance of language which is stunning.” He has been called a master of light. Whether writing about prairie or the urban forest outside his door, he says, “I became a better poet when I surrendered to beauty.” Bruce lives in Regina on Treaty 4 Territory and the Métis homeland.

Bruce Rice's profile page

,p>“A charming and wise book. These meditations blend points of view and moments of awareness with ease across time, cultures, and species. The resulting wholeness, formed out of awkward human life, is graceful and extraordinary.”
—Harold Rhenisch, author of Salmon Shanties and The Art of Haying: A Journey to Iceland
“This is Rice on pilgrimage... Standstill is a collection one experiences and this exemplary writer’s finest book to date.” —Shelley A. Leedahl, author of Go, I Wasn’t Always Like This, and Listen, Honey
“Bruce Rice’s carefully crafted essays take us deeper into what it is to be a brother, a friend, an artist in a fragmented world.” —Trevor Herriot, author of The Economy of Sparrows and Towards a Prairie Atonement