From the internationally celebrated author of Fugitive Pieces and the Griffin Poetry Prize-shortlisted collection Correspondences—and Toronto's Poet Laureate—comes a profoundly moving new collection of poetry of love and memory.

In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns to poetry with strikingly original lyrics to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of." In this passionate, piercing short collection, dedicated to the late Mark Strand, Michaels explores "love's dare / love's repair / a single stitch." In lyrics that ponder what happens to the bodies of lovers—so vital when together, different when apart, death coming to one before the other—she embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. The complete and sheltering understanding of a great love is a powerful presence in all the poems, with its particular imagery (the ringing fog, the white page of the bed), as is the shattering loss of its end.

Lyrics of various forms and two longer poems explore desire in a style chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, calm and almost classical in its precision. By the book's end, we are left with a renewed awareness of the mystery at the core of our astonishing lives. With Michaels, we enter a space that is "not inside / nor outside: dusk's / doorway," where memory might be kept alive.

ANNE MICHAELS is a novelist and poet. Her books have been translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. Among many other honours, she is a Royal Society of Literature International Writer, a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film and was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World. Her latest novel, Held, was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and won the 2024 Giller Prize.

Anne Michaels' profile page

Praise for All We Saw:
Shortlisted for the 2019 Vine Award for Poetry
“All We Saw brims with a universal but writerly belief in a companionship that endures beyond death. It marks the return of a poet to her initial calling – a return forged of immense love and suffering that insists on the necessity of poetry to revive what is lost. These poems reveal the uncanny and difficult truth that acknowledges how the dead guide us. It is a brave work that shows us there are no limits to love.” --Quill & Quire
Praise for Correspondences:
"[Correspondences], for all its modesty, attempts something momentous. It is a sustained interrogation of language, memory, history, sunlight, and rain in search of words that are simple and clean enough to speak, as Michaels says, from someplace 'deeper than a single heart'. It is a search for a language not only the living but also 'the dead might understand and trust'." --Jury citation, Griffin Poetry Prize