Winner, New Brunswick Book Award (Poetry) and Alcuin Society Book Design Awards Third Prize (Poetry)
Finalist, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry

Sue Sinclair has been praised for her "crisp, lyrical poems imbued with subtle, subtextual philosophic musings" (Globe and Mail). She has been described as a poet who "writes her way to a new understanding of the world and carries her readers with her" (Journal of Canadian Poetry). Sinclair’s debut collection, Secrets of Weather and Hope, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award, while subsequent collections have earned a place on the Globe Top 100 list (Mortal Arguments), won the IPPY Poetry Award (The Drunken Lovely Bird), and the Pat Lowther Award (Heaven’s Thieves).

This collection includes an introductory essay by editor and poet Ross Leckie, over one hundred selected poems from Sinclair’s twenty-year career, and new poems that consider the poet’s evolving relationships with the idea of beauty and with the more-than-human world in a time of manufactured upheaval. The new poems, many never-before published, exemplify Sinclair’s masterful powers of observation and her precise, arresting language.

Sue Sinclair grew up in St. John's, Newfoundland. Her extraordinary poetic powers were first recognized when she won two creative writing awards at University of New Brunswick: the Walker Prize and the Angela Ludvine Memorial Prize. Her first poetry collection, Secrets of Weather & Hope, was a finalist for the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award, and her second, Mortal Arguments, was a finalist for the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Her work appears frequently in magazines such as The Fiddlehead, Canadian Literature, Grain, The New Quarterly, and The Malahat Review, and in anthologies such as Coastlines and Breathing Fire II.

Sue Sinclair's profile page

• Winner, Alcuin Society Book Design Awards Third Prize (Poetry)
• Short-listed, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry
• Winner, New Brunswick Book Award (Poetry)

“From the early ‘thing poems,’ peppers and lilies mildly strange in hyperbolic clarity, to the later, sprawling politically alert pieces, Sue Sinclair operates within a keen, rigorous sensibility; from this her poems draw their remarkable muscularity and depth. Few writers explore specificity as she does. She carries us to a tantalizing ‘almost beauty.’”

Tim Lilburn, author of <i>The Names</i>

“It is such a gift to have Sinclair's new and selected poems in one place, to see the remarkable evolution of her voice, and to see how singular her vision has been over time. Sinclair has pursued an artist's understanding of the sublime her entire writing life, and here is that pursuit in all its fearful beauty. Almost Beauty is like water. Essential. It’s that good.”

Elizabeth Bachinksy, author of <i>The Hottest Summer in Recorded History</i>