Purchase at your local independent bookstore, on the publisher’s website, or from Indigo
Shadow Blight
Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award
“This rare achievement combines formal poetic mastery with honesty and vulnerability.”
-Jury citation
Shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Award
Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award
The best Canadian poetry of 2022 (CBC Books)
My favourite books of 2022: Marsha Lederman (The Globe and Mail)
Cream of the Crop: Free Press reviewers weigh in on their top titles for 2022 (Winnipeg Free Press)
“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)
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.”
Murmurations
“Murmurations pushes the limits of comparison and convention to suggest an existence that, despite our technological complexity and our tendency to set ourselves apart from the natural world, is creaturely and embodied.“
–Plenitude Magazine (Noah Cain)
“Murmurations is a joy to read and hear!”
–Atlantic Books Today (Dr. Afua Cooper)“What makes Murmurations especially memorable is MacAskill’s attentiveness to the ways nature engulfs her characters. From birdsongs to the ‘green hiss of the leaves,’ the natural world is ever-present.”
-THIS Magazine (Jessica Rose)
From the publisher:
Murmurations is a collection of love poems that explores how intimacy tests the capacity of language—how music is also noise and the prospect for miscommunication abounds. Populating her poems with birdsong and murmurings of the natural world, MacAskill highlights how poets and lovers share much with birders on the twitch, how even keen observation and intense passion can fail us as we pursue our beloved across distances and through time. Yet when we do finally find love it often seems, like a rare bird, “at once/singular and improbable/ because of how clearly it appeared to us.”
Reviews
Carousel Magazine (Jade Wallace)
Carousel Magazine (Sneha Subramanian Kanta)
This Magazine (Jessica Rose)
Plenitude Magazine (Noah Cain)
Atlantic Books Today (Afua Cooper)
No Meeting Without Body
Nominated for the League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (2019)
Shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award (Atlantic Book Awards)
knifeforkbook 2018 pick
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.
Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos
Annick MacAskill 