Award-winning Canadian writer Patricia Keeney's latest collection of poetry, First Woman, continues her personal journeys inward and across the world. Lyric and political, emotionally raw and deeply human, the volume ranges from sexual love to family, from writing to confrontations with power and profound meditations on life and culture. Her ninth collection since her debut in 1988 with Swimming Alone, these new poems -- as the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has written of her -- are filled with "the fiery mystery of inspiration> a mystery 'that burns long after one closes the book." First Woman is both personal and political. It takes personal journeys inward and across the world. It both thinks and feels, striking a broadly humanist note in a literary world of theory, a technological world of quick fixes and a political world lacking vision. First Woman, also includes some of her most popular poems from earlier volumes making it an important place to either begin one's own love affair with this unique and admired poet or to continue it. In either case, the contact will be filled with insight, intelligence and love.

Patricia Keeney is the author of nine books of poetry and a picaresque novel entitled The Incredible Shrinking Wife. Her Selected Poems, published in 1996, contains an introduction by the distinguished Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Her poetry has been translated into French (winning the Prix Jean Paris in 2003), Spanish, Bulgarian, Chinese and Hindi. Keeney has also produced an experiment in poetry and theatre called Vocal Braiding with sound poet and playwright Penn Kemp, published by Pendas Productions. In 2009, Les Amis de la Poésie in Bergerac published a new French translation of her work and in the same year, the South African journal New Contrast featured a series of her poems based on her living experience in that country. One of three Canadian writers sent to Mexico on a cultural exchange progam under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Keeney used this experience to create a series of conversations and poems on national and personal culture. Called You Bring Me Wings, it will be published in Spanish and English by Antares Press in 2011.

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