Gift Horse, Mark Callanan's second full-length collection of poetry, was largely written following a near-fatal medical emergency in 2007. The poems offer up the story of a young man whose gratitude at being alive is undercut by Lazarus-like confusion and ambivalence. Brandishing a newly acute sense of mortality, Callanan emerges as an Atlantic flâneur stalked by terrifying sea legends, death-steeped domesticity (where even supermarket lobsters "weigh in against oblivion") and the extinct Newfoundland Wolf. Understated, sinister and unsettling, Gift Horse is a work of considerable craft and vision.

Mark Callanan is the author of Scarecrow [Killick Press, 2003], critically-acclaimed first book of poems, and Sea Legend [Frog Hollow Press, 2010], winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

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Praise for Mark Callanan:"Breathtaking, such mastery in a poet so young... it seems to me he is a diviner who has mastered metaphor and much else besides." --Fiddlehead

"Mark Callanan's voice is distinctive and confident, funny, grave, occasionally visionary, and his technical gifts are multifold." --Books in Canada

"Callanan has talent to burn, whether producing his seascapes or nature studies or human-subject poems. His eye is exact, his discipline imagist." --George Elliott Clarke