In her debut collection, poet Rhonda Ganz, brazenly mixes darks with lights and dares to peg out the quirky and bizarre, both real and imagined, with all seams showing. From spontaneous combustion to suicide, from pterodactyls to pumpkin pie, Ganz is obsessed with the way people behave in moments of intimacy and domesticity. With her sharp wit and painterly abstractions, she pairs the banal with the absurd to expose the flaws of love –the frayed edges of belief and despair. Strung up, these poems are an authentic clothesline of hearsay, fabrication, doomsaying and half-truths. Ganz takes the ordinary, gives it a poke and a spin and snaps it out to dry.

Rhonda Ganz’s poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, Room, on city buses and in the anthologies Rocksalt, Poems from Planet Earth, and Force Field: 77 Women Poets of BC. She writes poems on the spot for people in hotel lobbies, parks and cemeteries. She is also a graphic designer.

Rhonda Ganz's profile page

"There has never been a poet like Rhonda Ganz. What a magician of words she is, what sleights of narrative she performs. The pleasure for the reader is unending, no matter how many times you roll these poems off your tongue. There’s such brightness here, such wry humour, such serious whimsicality. If this is what laundry looks like, the wind couldn’t be happier and I want some on my line."/p

Lorna Crozier, author of The Blue Hour of the Day and What the Soul Doesn’t Want

"Rhonda Ganz’s debut collection of poetry is breathtaking, refreshing, direct, oblique. This is not your ordinary first collection of poems; there is nothing standard here. These poems are smart, sassy, quirky, scary—and funny. They are absurd; they are real to the bone. These are small—and not so small—perfect poems. Read this collection for its haunt of the surreal; read it for how it plumbs the truth.”

Arleen Paré, author of He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car and The Girls with Stone Faces