Purchase at your local independent bookstore and on the publisher’s website

Votive (2024)

Shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award (2025)

Shortlisted for the Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award (2025)

“‘I am responsible / for what happens, but if that’s true, / that means the beauty, too” writes Annick MacAskill in Votive, an assured yet introspective collection. […] MacAskill’s dynamic mastery of form, from the glosa to the sonnet, is so confident and seamless that [Votive] reads like a play. This quality turns the book itself into a kind of sacred text, a gorgeous and heartrending prayer for “the space between our secrets” — whether these secrets are whispers of a family member’s death from AIDS, a teeanger’s fliration with eating disorders, or a 35-year-old’s missed periods. In one of the titular “Votive” poems, MacAskill writes that she “saw the light, / and then was swallowed by its heat.” The light she uses to illuminate the subjets of this collection has the same searing, indelible quality.“

-Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award jury citation

“Annick MacAskill’s Votive, the anticipated follow-up to her 2022 Governor General’s Award–winning collection Shadow Blight, combines themes of intimacy, privacy, eros, and queerness, while the transgressive and the religious infuse this collection. […] Traditions become cinematic and laughable, yet somehow, in MacAskill’s hands these rituals remain necessary and essential. If everything exists in context, as claimed, then the rituals on trial are framed by the twin pillars of devotional vow and wisdom. The subtlety of the subtext in Votive is indeed like smoke: you can wander through it effortlessly, but the scent of it remains in your clothes.“

–Quill & Quire (Micheline Maylor)

From the publisher:

Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope and meaning when language falters —“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I / knew and knew and knew.”

Shadow Blight (2022)

“From the opening lines (“The tulips give up the ghosts / of themselves, their petals supple boats / on my window ledge and table”) to the closing (“but the centre of you / was white and blue / a star”), this is a lyric collection in the most literal sense of the word: melodic, rhythmic, finely tuned, a pleasure to hear aloud even if you discount all of its other qualities. That the book is simultaneously emotionally devastating (as when the speaker says to her unborn child “there you were / shuddering / into the toilet bowl”), culturally resonant (“Priam / is to eat before he wails, / as Niobe attended to her own body / before returning”) and formally and tonally surprising (“SMEAR THAT FERTILE PULP / ON MY FACE O PRIEST”), makes it a nearly perfect book..“

–CAROUSEL Magazine (Jade Wallace)

“MacAskill’s poetry is haunted. She finds language in a void, movement in stillness, and creates a lexicon for articulating her losses. Much like [Pierre] Nepveu, MacAskill’s work is a powerful exploration of what it means to survive–in language, in life, in familial love. […] Both masterful poets look to the translative, enduring qualities of poetry as both a way through grief and a way to immortalize love.”

–Canadian Notes & Queries (Emily Mernin)

“In Shadow Blight, MacAskill has this uncanny power to command a hurricane and direct it with surgical precision. […] An emotional read, well-crafted but also extremely accessible. Highly recommend.”

-The Miramichi Reader (Michael Russell)

Other Reviews

–The Ampersand Review (Jacob Alvarado)

–Atlantic Books Today (Alexia Major)

–Winnipeg Free Press (Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen)

From the publisher:

Shadow Blight considers the pain and isolation of pregnancy loss through the lens of classical myth. Drawing on the stories of Niobe–whose monumental suffering at the loss of her children literally turned her to stone–and others, this collection explores the experience of being swept away by grief and silenced by the world. Skirting the tropes (“o how beautiful / the poets make our catastrophes”), MacAskill interweaves the ancient with the contemporary in a way that opens possibilities and offers a new language for those “shut up in stillness.”

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“Lyric precision and lyric polish aren’t, as I might not really need to explain, the same thing. And while my interest in the lyric doesn’t necessarily gravitate towards the polish of a more straightforward line, there is something about the poems in Halifax poet Annick MacAskill’s debut, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), that compel my attention. Her poems are narrative, sure, but hardly straightforward, achieving an accumulation of thoughts and movement, as well as the occasional narrative disjunction and disruption, composed as polished poems both precise and slightly jagged, slightly off; punchy and visceral. She knows how to compose poems that suggest one purpose, and provide something slightly different (such as her attempts to twist certain Canadian standards), all while moving through a series of meditative, first-person lyric narratives. The poems in No Meeting Without Body range from good to compelling, and often with such a nebulous difference between that it becomes difficult to articulate. Needless to say, there are a couple of poems here that left me breathless.”

–rob mclennan

From the publisher’s website:

The poems in Annick MacAskill’s debut collection No Meeting Without Body are confident and crisp. Departing from works of art and literature, historical figures, myth, and anecdote, her poems draw the reader into their subjects with unaffected frankness and intimacy, answering society’s most reductive forces with a resistance rooted in the dignity of human connection.

Chapbooks

five from hem (2024)

Shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award (2025)

“Within the span of five poems, Annick MacAskill’s five from hem manages a feat few achieve even in a full-length work: the articulation of a personal poetics. Laying classical translation against vibrantly contemporary re-imaginings, and forming them along the lines of her own distinctive shorthand, MacAskill creates a snowglobe cosmos that transcends millenia.”

-bpNichol Chapbook Award judges’ citation

from the publisher’s website:

This beautiful little chapbook from the incomparable Annick MacAskill is the kind of feminist revisioning that comes straight out of Gap Riot’s dreams. This collection is five tall, gorgeous feats of poetic prowess where MacAskill writes from the perspective of female figures from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poems consider sex, gender, desire, and sexual violence in Ovid and beyond, and each poem works to animate and amplify voices that, as the author notes, “say little to nothing in the original text.” Each poem begins with an epigraph from the Metamorphoses with the author’s original translation and then it starts running down these long pages it’s become some wild animal. These poems are from a larger project, hem, and we cannot wait to see the whole thing!

Printed all tall and beautiful and textured and in a limited run of fifty copies at Product Photo in Toronto, this chapbook and all translations of Ovid are by Annick MacAskill. It was typeset by Dani Spinosa who also did the cover design.

Chapbook, Gap Riot Press, 2024

Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos (2016)