When the Colours Run is a collection of 41 poems that speak to the human condition as well as the fragile state of the planet with a voice that is deeply personal, eclectic, and universally evocative. At times meditative and at times darkly humorous, the poems in this collection wrestle with the timeless questions each of us must walk with in some way throughout our lives: "who am I in this life?" and "what does it all mean?" Using the seasons of the earth in sometimes playful and often startling ways, as well as drawing on cycles of light and dark, the poems move from one season to the next, and illustrate how not only do we move through the seasons but the seasons also move through us. Are we listening? the collection asks of us. Are we listening to the earth's stories, to how the forest heals itself, to how the stone knows about the rain, to how things sometimes break to become more whole? The poems in this collection talk about love and relationships, loss and grief, impermanence and transcendence and beg the reader to listen and listen well to the human heart, which is so deeply connected to the blooming and evolving patterns and cycles of the earth.
As Wang Fou has said, "If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself."

When the Colours Run is an attempt to ring that bell, softly and not softly, the bell we have all heard somewhere at some time, perhaps deep in the night, as we waited, fervently, for the return of the light.

Lisa Shatzky's poetry has been published in The Vancouver Review, Room Magazine, Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, The Nashwaak Review, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, Canadian Literature, Canadian Woman Studies, The Prairie Journal, Jones Av., Grain, The New Quarterly, Monday's Poem, and six chapbooks by Leaf Press (edited by Patrick Lane) along with anthologies across Canada and the US. Her poetry book Blame it on the Moon was published by Black Moss Press in 2013 and was shortlisted for the 2014 Acorn Plantos Award for People's Poetry. Her poetry book Do Not Call Me By My Name, also published by Black Moss Press (2011), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Poetry Award in 2012. Shatzky has also had prose published in Living Artfully: Reflections from the Far West Coast (Key Publishing, 2012) as well as poetry in This Island We Celebrate, published by the Bowen Island Arts Council in 2013. Shatzky is already setting up poetry readings across BC, in Toronto, and in Montreal for her new poetry collection, When the Colours Run.

Many reviews of her work can be found online and on Black Moss Press' website. Over the past two years Lisa Shatzky has done poetry readings of her work on Bowen Island, Salt Spring Island, Hornby Island, Cortes Island, Quadra Island, in Nanaimo, Nelson, Castlegar, Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Hope, Whistler, Pemberton, Toronto, Caledon, Montreal, Quebec City, and at the University of British Columbia, Douglas College, Simon Fraser University, McGill University, Concordia University, and UQUAM.

When not writing she runs marathons as a way of meditation and works as a psychotherapist on Bowen Island, BC, where she lives on a boat with her partner Don, her teenagers, a dog called Sherman, and three cats.

Lisa Shatzky's profile page