The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out

Book excerpt: In her fourth collection, and the first since the Griffin Poetry Prize–winning Pigeon, Karen Solie advances her extraordinary poetics of impetus and second thoughts. Ferrying the intimate self through the public realm, these poems meditate on the tensile strength of our most elemental bonds and beliefs. Consistently attuned to the demotic and the enigmatic, she returns our language to us as if new again, in a style somehow both nomadic and steady, both unpredictable and meticulously crafted. Intelligent, witty, tough-minded, and perceptive, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out offers Solie's most exciting and captivating work to date, in poems of natural contemplation and uncertainty ranging under the aegis of lyric grace.