A stunning debut book of poems from a bold new voice unafraid to engage with the exigencies of our contemporary world.

In Liz Howards wild, scintillating debut, the mechanisms we use to make sense of our worlds even our direct intimate experiences of it come under constant scrutiny and a pressure that feels like love. What Howard can accomplish with language strikes us as electric, a kind of alchemy of perception and catastrophe, fidelity and apocalypse. The waters of Northern Ontario shield country are the toxic origin and an image of potential. A subject, a woman, a consumer, a polluter; an erotic force, a confused brilliance, a very necessary form of urgency all are loosely tethered together and made somehow to resonate with our own devotions and fears; made to be small and dreaming parallel / to ceremony and decay. Liz Howard is what contemporary poetry needs right now.