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$3.74The Story
WINNER OF T.S. ELIOT PRIZE
WINNER OF GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR POETRY
WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE
A Guardian, Financial Times, CBC, and Observer Best Book of 2025
The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solieās sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural, economic, and personal ideas of āvalue,ā addressing housing, economic and environmental crisis, and aging and its incumbent losses. In an era of accelerating inequality, places many of us thought of as home have become unaffordable. In āBasement Suite,ā the faux-utopian economy of Airbnb suggests people with property āshareā it with us and, presumably, we should be grateful. In āParables of the Ratā the speaker feels affinity with scavengers while also wanting the rats gone.
Having grown up in Saskatchewan on a small family farm, Solie sees the economic and environmental crises as inseparable. Climate change has made small farming increasingly untenable, allowing overbearing corporate control of food production. But hope, Solie argues, is as necessary to addressing the crises of our time as bearing witness, in poems that celebrate wonder and persistence in the non-human world. Tamarack forests in Newfoundland that grow inches over hundreds of years, the suddenly thriving pronghorn antelope, or a new, unidentified and ineradicable climbing vine, all hint at renewal, and a way to move forward.
Description
WINNER OF T.S. ELIOT PRIZE
WINNER OF GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR POETRY
WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE
A Guardian, Financial Times, CBC, and Observer Best Book of 2025
The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solieās sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural, economic, and personal ideas of āvalue,ā addressing housing, economic and environmental crisis, and aging and its incumbent losses. In an era of accelerating inequality, places many of us thought of as home have become unaffordable. In āBasement Suite,ā the faux-utopian economy of Airbnb suggests people with property āshareā it with us and, presumably, we should be grateful. In āParables of the Ratā the speaker feels affinity with scavengers while also wanting the rats gone.
Having grown up in Saskatchewan on a small family farm, Solie sees the economic and environmental crises as inseparable. Climate change has made small farming increasingly untenable, allowing overbearing corporate control of food production. But hope, Solie argues, is as necessary to addressing the crises of our time as bearing witness, in poems that celebrate wonder and persistence in the non-human world. Tamarack forests in Newfoundland that grow inches over hundreds of years, the suddenly thriving pronghorn antelope, or a new, unidentified and ineradicable climbing vine, all hint at renewal, and a way to move forward.
