The Human Shore is an accomplished collection of poems both grittily real and spiritual, the follow-up to Russell Thornton's critically acclaimed House Built of Rain. Whether describing a tidal wave, a train yard, or the ravaging effects of a wildfire, Thornton's work is arresting and masterful. The poet covers a wide variety of places and subjects, including a woman and her child in Thessaloniki, rats in a basement, a BC river "grind[ing] mountains down to tears" and catacombs in Lima, where "human corpses were bulldozed / tumbling over and under one another like adult rag dolls."

Barry Dempster has called Thornton's poems "expansive, exquisitely detailed, eloquently transformative" and Patrick Lane deems them "impeccable in their craft." By turns elegant and shocking--and often both at once--The Human Shore, promises to leave an indelible mark on Canadian poetry.

Russell Thornton's books include The Fifth Window, A Tunisian Notebook, House Built of Rain (shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award for poetry), The Human Shore, and his latest collection, Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain. He won the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 and The Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize in 2009. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, among them Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, Open Wide A Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2011 Anthology, and Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012. His poems have twice been featured on Vancouver buses as part of BC's Poetry in Transit. For several years he divided his life between Vancouver and Aberystwyth, Wales, and then Salonica, Greece. For the past number of years he has lived where he was born and grew up, in North Vancouver.

Russell Thornton's profile page

"Russell Thornton gently invites his readers to follow him through places like empty piers, backseats of taxicabs, boxcars, and a basement full of rats with his latest collection of poetry, The Human Shore. Thornton's work explodes over each page with beautiful metaphors and images. His writing style is one that demands attention from his reader, and rightfully so, because no reader could afford to overlook any aspect of Thornton's work. There is balance in his poetry and an understanding of people and lifestyles that usually get tucked away from public eye, such as drugs and sex-trade workers. ... Thornton's work is real, spiritual and reads like a friend writing a heartfelt letters that only you will read. I highly recommend Russell Thornton's The Human Shore to all the poetry readers out there who are interested in a book that will be read cover-to-cover many times. ... 5 out of 5."
--Taryn Hubbard, JIVE Magazine

JIVE

"Thornton often shows a Bishop-like attention to detail, giving painstaking descriptions of the object or site in question and of the precise circumstances and manner of his encounter with it. These poems, that is, ground us so firmly in the physical world that their excursions into more metaphysical realms feel not so much like flights from reality as deeper explorations of its essence."
-Malcolm Woodland, University of Toronto Quarterly

UofT Quarterly