Winner of the 2020 Nelson Ball Prize

Careful attention reveals that, even in moments that seem insignificant, our minds are constantly navigating disjunctions among registers of experience. Our intellect silently reminds our eyes that the car that appears to be moving between leaves is actually behind them and much larger. The sound of the vacuum cleaner in the next room is noise to be ignored. The phrase that arises in mind belongs to a conversation earlier in the day. Clear thinking demands that these navigations remain unconscious. But what if they're meaningful, or productive, in themselves? What if they're necessary to help us find a more meaningful place in the world? Branches explores these questions.

Mark Truscott's first book, Said Like Reeds or Things (Coach House, 2004), was shortlisted for a ReLit award and received an Alcuin citation for Darren Wershler-Henry's design. Poems appear in Pissing Ice: An Anthology of 'New`'Canadian Poets (BookThug, 2004) and in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 2005). Mark was born in Bloomington, Indiana, but has spent most of his life in Canada. He lives in Toronto, where he co-edits the small magazine BafterC and curates the Test Reading Series.

Mark Truscott's profile page

"Branches will change you, and for that, at the very least, it deserves your full attention." —Robin Richardson, author of Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis and Sit How You Want

"Mark Truscott's Branches is a unique and assured meditative work, at once ancient and wholly contemporary, a space where Stevens, Ashbery, and Basho might mingle and discover some as-yet unnoticed path. 'There are smooth surfaces it seems one can only buy,' Truscott adroitly observes. Branches is full of lines ready to take root and reward, allowing perception all its richness but also changing and transforming it with a graceful and almost natural pressure. Reader, these poems are the furthest thing from those surfaces." —Jeff Latosik, author of Dreampad