The past infuses the present in the poems gathered in this collection. Painting a transformative Southeast wind helps restore a culture to a decimated people. Everyday events trigger a yearning for love from those already departed. A goldfish experiences poetry for the first time, again. An arduous trek through the Peruvian mountains leads to a stone that stops the sun. By turns ironic, comic, imagistic, experimental, these poems ask what's next, and how we get there.

David Haskins wanted to write ever since Enid Blyton sent him a handwritten postcard when he was seven. He also wanted to become a veterinary surgeon. He settled for mentorships under CanLit’s A-listers Joe Rosenblatt, Austin Clarke, Matt Cohen, John Herbert, P.K. Page and others, and a career teaching English to high schoolers. His poetry books, Reclamation (Borealis, 1980) and Blood Rises (Guernica, 2020), and his literary memoir This House is Condemned (Wolsak and Wynn, 2013) top a long list of published works that have won first place awards from the CBC, the Ontario Poetry Society, the Canadian Authors Association, gritLIT and Arts Hamilton. He continues to live in the family home in Grimsby, Ontario.

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Haskins carries such tonal vacillations with a deliberate and practised voice, both in this poem and throughout the collection, his aptitude for literary craft offering an aesthetic equanimity that clearly marks these varied pieces as his own. Read Blood Rises if you want to be shown how fully a person can manifest their life in poetry after decades of discipline.

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