From the Governor-General's Award-winning poet, a brilliant and provocative book of essays, responding to patterns in current literature and thought. The writing is intimate, improvisational, enthusiastic. Compton considers among many topics, how the writer changes in retirement; the obsession with the house in fiction; the role of place in poetry; the relationship between poetry and the visual arts; and contemporary notions of the beautiful.

Anne Compton
Is a two-time winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry for her second collection, Processional. In 2008, she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts. A former teacher and writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, she developed and directed the acclaimed Lorenzo Reading Series.

"[Compton's] poems and prose-poems provoke and stimulate thinking about where the boundaries between experience, observation, perception, expression, and communication might lie."
— PN Review

"Her writing points to a persistent, saving grace, a lyric remainder — given 'the small manoeuvres left us now' — that can still find its way somehow into these moving, finely made poems.
— Event

Anne Compton's profile page

"Throughout the collection, Compton returns to themes that have occupied her throughout her career: home, childhood, history, science, and writing. She discusses compiling anthologies (she edited both Modern Canadian Poets and New Canadian Poetry) with generosity and intimacy, characteristics that return in the book's closing piece, "The Listener." Ultimately, distinctions between the personal essays and the scholarly ones don't affect a reader's experience; Afterwork is accessible, insightful, and filled with clarity and guidance."
— Quill and Quire