About the Author

Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw in the province of Saskatchewan, and now lives in Toronto. She initially wanted a career as a vet but dropped that plan to pursue her writing. Her first publication, in 1995, was in a prestigious anthology, Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets. This was followed in 2001 by her first collection, Short Haul Engine, from Brick Books, awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and shortlisted for three other prizes, including the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2005 she published her second collection with Brick, Modern and Normal, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her third collection, Pigeon, published by Anansi in 2009, won her the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, Pat Lowther Award and Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She was International Writer-in-Residence at the University of St Andrews in 2011, is an Associate Director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio program in Banff, Alberta, and took part in Poetry Parnassus at London's Southbank Centre in 2012. Her poems have been published across Canada, in the US, UK, and Europe, and have been translated into French, German, Korean and Dutch. Her first UK edition, The Living Option: Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013. All the new poems in the Bloodaxe edition have since been published in North America in a new collection, The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out (Anansi, Canada; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, US, 2015). Her latest collection is The Caiplie Caves (House of Anansi, Canada; Picador, UK, 2019).

Reviews

Enormous credit goes to Bloodaxe for commissioning this exhilarating volume, Solie’s first book publication outside Canada...there is hardly a poem in The Living Option that I wouldn't cite with alacrity and delight.
*London Review of Books*

A fierce writing of quickness and edge that can take on just about anything: the highway, Freud, farm suicides, sturgeon, all manner of flawed and far-off romance - with candour and a trenchant humour that's the cutting edge of intelligence. Not to mention sly skinny music, not to mention sheer metaphorical pounce, moves that accomplish themselves before you realise they're underway - Karen Solie's work reminds me that there is at the heart of metaphor a delicious amoral joy, that raw irrepressible humour often personified in the trickster which kicks in no matter how "painful" or "depressing" the subject.
*Don McKay*

Solie's language is blistered, contagious; a level-eyed, machine-age ecstasy, tempered by circumstance, where "Lions lie with lambs in the rusted box of a half-ton". At times trapped in a furious Now, at others gorgeously elegiac, Short Haul Engine is a truer music of consciousness for its shifts and confusions, a music wrenched from the what's-there, for the "overbuilt" and "jerry-rigged". Let the world revolve around the badlands awhile.
*Ken Babstock*