An elaborate meditation on the challenges to the female self and the long-term partnership of raising a child, this work is a compelling, personal interrogation of both the notion of family and parenting. From the intersection of technology and the lyricism of landscape in “The Seating Place (Not Aided by a Computer),” a poetic cycle written against the backdrop of a Georgian Bay summer that becomes a reckoning with her family of origins and the birth of her first child, to the confrontation of un- and less-spoken struggles in “Bringing You Up,” Christakos charts a new poetic terrain. Over the course of this book, she describes the complex and passionate realm of responsibility and accountability.

Margaret Christakos is attached to this earth. Born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario, she has worked as a poet, writer, editor, instructor, and poetry-culture builder in Toronto since the late 1980s. Her body of work includes nine collections of poetry, numerous chapbooks, a novel, and an inter-genre memoir. She has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and is a recipient of the ReLit Award for poetry and the Bliss Carman Award. Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos was published in 2017 (Laurier Poetry series). She has held appointments as Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor, Western University, London Public Library, and the University of Alberta. She is associate faculty with the MFA program in creative writing at University of Guelph-Humber and has taught widely as a sessional, most recently at Ryerson University. In 2018–2019, she was Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University College, University of Toronto. She has three adult children and lives in Toronto.

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